Covid 19 (OPEN DISCUSSION)

[Miguel Sanchez]

Definitely McGowan’s fault every time some poor doorman at Dan Murphy’s gets yelled at. Because we can’t expect people to be responsible for their own actions.

 

[Carbine Chaos]

Given we live in a time where you can have pretty much anything delivered, massive first world problems.

 

[Balls In]

Given we live in a time where you can have pretty much anything delivered, massive first world problems.

It will affect indigenous people in remote communities who are statistically over represented as unvaxxed. And the poor bastards fronting them. And the hard core anti vaxxers.

 

[Miguel Sanchez]

Given we live in a time where you can have pretty much anything delivered, massive first world problems.

Not to mention it’s free to, you know, just get the bloody vaccine.

 

[Carbine Chaos]

It will affect indigenous people in remote communities mostly. And the poor bastards fronting them.

Given the importance of keeping the virus out of communities, good. Need to make sure they're as vaxxed as possible.

 

[bzparkes]

It will affect indigenous people in remote communities who are statistically over represented as unvaxxed. And the poor bastards fronting them.

Is this meant to be a bad thing?

Am I missing something here?

 

[Balls In]

Is this meant to be a bad thing?

Am I missing something here?

Yes.
1) Some poor bastards are going to have to front this on behalf of the state govt compliance crackdown
2) It's ridiculous and unnecessary persecution of a statistically irrelevant section of the community from a community health perspective.

 

[Miguel Sanchez]

Also, the strict proof of vax laws are going to lead to protests against the proof of vax laws, and people are going to have to walk past those protests.

Has McGowan even thought about the people that will walk past the protests?

 

[Balls In]

And, 3) the state made a mistake admitting the first 2 doses are only 4% effective and demanding Vax hesitant people take them anyway. Or no booze for you!

 

[MIKE85]

Again with the 4% rubbish

 

[ziad]

Again with the 4% rubbish

this is a freak show, just got to look every now and then

 

[Balls In]

Again with the 4% rubbish

This was quoted off McGowan's backflip presser. Typically unique "science" I would agree.

 

[Georgie 404]

community health perspective.

back in around 2003 we were told by our politicians and media Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. It was completely based on a lie, with not a single person ( in politics or media) ever being held to account for the hundreds and thousands of deaths / murdered



This time when a real weapon of mass destruction (a bioweapon) is released there is not even a whisper of going after those responsible, by our politicians and media.
Instead we are told / mandated (under duress of loss of job et ) to comply to the “protocols“
Go figure

 

[Scotland]

Much of the last few pages have been Scotland exercising his keyboard skills to promote that - dare I say it - selfish position.

LOL. You weren't up to it a week or two ago, now you are talking about me without tagging me. I don't know if I should be flattered or concerned.

You know what's selfish? Expecting everyone to put their lives on hold - indefinitely - because you don't want to acknowledge that your idol has no plan B after two years.

Put your **** on the block. Do you want things to go back to normal or not? How long is enough 'state daddy' protection? 3 years? 5 years? 10 years?

That was a lot of words to say “I don’t want to wear a mask, the people who are scared of Covid should be the ones taking precautions.”

You too? I thought you were better than that.

I'm happy to WFH, not travel, socially distance, wear a mask etc. - if there is a point to it. I'm not double vaccinated (not that it seems to matter now, 'omicron changed everything') because I like needles. Are we going to take on COVID or hide behind the rabbit proof fence forever?

I was just watching Channel 9 news (because it came on between Barty and K/K) and The Library night club is the centre of an "outbreak" and a "super spreader event". The reporter is talking about 14 cases. Fourteen. You'd think the hospital system was at breaking point. People have a rude shock coming if they think single or double figure cases being traced and going into iso is newsworthy.

Just on the tennis, big crowd in attendance.

 

[Ishmael_]

No, I’m sincerely interested in what you mean by the term. You stated in that message that there is a chance for the erosion of rights, so it seems to me that, given you know when they can be lost, that means you have a clear idea of what they are.

I see people bring it up all the time on here, and I just can’t really get them. As such, how would you define them?

Sure, as you're likely aware, in Australia we don't have a BoR. Indeed we don't have many rights that you could consider as guaranteed or incredibly hard to change (5 in the constitution, 6 with defacto right to freedom of political communication --> free speech(ish)). We do however have a patchwork of legislation in different areas of the law (employment, health, communications etc), case law affirmed by Australian courts based on international precedent and some human rights legislation in different states which is why you see quixotic challenges to federal law by Victorian complainants, for example. All of which is subject to parliament exercising its authority and expunging them (constitution requires ref double majority etc).

So broadly speaking we have 'rights' or perhaps more accurately we have norms that fall in line with most liberal democracies but that rely more heavily on broad readings by the courts and can be changed at the whim of lawmakers.

Take for example the right to associate - which is enshrined in some states that have adopted the ICCPR, the Fair Work Act etc but isn't explicitly protected by CTH, (the HC is unclear). We all take the right to associate as basically a given, but that 'right' has never been less clear and has been slowly eroded by legislation over the last decade aimed at stopping 'Bikies', the HC for its part has essentially upheld the laws or not dealt with the question of association and if it is protected.

These laws have done very little to quell Bikie gangs, but they have overwhelmingly targeted indigenous peoples, increasing sentencing and incarceration rates, making it easier to issue move-on notices etc. Similarly, the extraordinary powers used during the pandemic quite nakedly show that whatever right to association we thought we had was ephemeral.

Another example, in Australia, you can't refuse service to someone based on sex/race/religion - this is law. What happens when we start seeing Indigenous and minority peoples turned away from service at disproportionate numbers to other cultural groups on the basis of their vaccination status? This will happen.

Another one that has almost been ignored - that's the intention - is the intrusion on privacy and communications - diluting longstanding 'rights' to have a reasonable expectation of privacy from government interference. This started after 9/11 when sweeping reforms were brought in, it got crazy in 2015, but we were all fine with metadata because, 'why do I need to hide my IP address'? We now know that metadata is essentially everything, but the laws are on the books. Again in 2018, the law was changed again with the TOLA amendment, which means that private companies can now share data, agencies can demand back doors, encryption broken etc. etc.

And then what do we see in 2019 but an AFP raid on the Sunday Telegraph, we also found out that the AFP had accessed Journalists' metadata on numerous occasions over the preceding years. In 2021, despite objections, the government passed the most egregious surveillance amendments in the midst of a pandemic which gave cover for the expansive surveillance state (hell, it was/is a time where tracking apps were launched and have been required for practical living) and those amendments essentially allow for warrantless hacking of your devices.

This all creates a chilling effect on freedom of the press, expression and protest and if you do not think it will affect groups that you care about, you are wrong. There is a long-standing pattern of successive governments using extraordinary circumstances to introduce bad law which never goes away and will be used to narrow a liberal society.

 

[Ilkka Sinisalo]

How many cases in the community were there last year when we had mask mandates? How many cases of alpha/delta did it take to attract "extreme risk" status? Since people seem intent on living in the past. Cloth masks do next to nothing, and the whole point of wearing masks (see the continent of Asia to our north) is to not spread what you have. Healthy people wearing masks is dumb. Me wearing a mask to order a pint then sitting down at a table of 10 people for an hour without a mask is dumb.

I'm aware there were windows of time I could have gone to certain states (and risked the consequences of doing so) but normal people don't operate like that. I went to the Australian Open one year, 2015 I think. Not really much point telling me a day out from the final that I could've gone there for a 3 week window 6 months ago is there?

Every step of the way WA has been trying to level up against everyone else. Once we got on top of the tiny number of cases we had in 2020 it has been pretty smooth sailing yet the govt was still trying to stoke fear every time a single case slips through their net. It's COVID, not meth. No one is cooking up cases in their back shed in iso.

Nice strawman, but I am opposed to doing things that I believe achieve nothing, and I am opposed to over the top reactions. So someone had delta and went to the Indian Ocean Brewing, big whoop. Isn't that why we have a check in system and contact tracing? If your immediate response to that is a snap lockdown or Perth and Peel mask mandate then you need to get real. I am done with jumping at shadows. I was on board with proper lockdowns and keeping the border closed. But it's not 2020 (which we miraculously managed to survive without masks). We have a vaccine now and I'm on board with that despite the concerns of great minds like Pete Evans, we have had 2 years to prepare the health system, we've seen the stats for alpha, delta and omicron and people are still stuck in this insular mindset of 'keeping out the virus'. We've got 1 case IIRC in our hospital system, it's 40 degrees outside, the current variant has a very low ICU/fatality rate and we're still sitting around too afraid to do anything.

At what point do the people who don't want to go anywhere or do anything 'because omicron' take some responsibility for themselves and let everyone else move on? If there were no restrictions whatsoever you could still wear a mask, socially distance, not travel, not go to events with large crowds etc.

Confusion takes over as WA changes course on multiple COVID fronts

Western Australia has had two years to prepare for COVID but as case numbers rise and the state government changes tack on multiple fronts, questions are mounting as to how clear the plan is behind the scenes.

www.abc.net.au

Nasty Murdoch/7West owned ABC criticising the govt...

There were very few community cases when we had mask mandates. You seem to be taking the outcome (little to no community spread) and then using it to criticise the government for having lockdowns and mask mandates. Well, the NSW government was happy to keep all the shops open and let people continue doing whatever they wanted after some community transmission kicked off due to old mate taxi driver. The end result, as I mentioned in my previous post, was hundreds of people dead, three months of lockdown which helped to keep the hospitals from getting overwhelmed but never managed to get fully on top of the outbreak, and significant economic damage. Call me crazy but I think that 3-5 days of shops being closed and people wearing masks for a week or two, possibly needlessly, is better than 3 months of lockdown and hundreds of people dead.

We have a check in system and contact tracing so to help get on top of cases of community transmission, that's just one tool. It's like you lack the ability to understand that places which have gone hard to eradicate Covid from the get-go have actually been able to do so; this has been proven repeatedly. As for the ICU/fatality rate of Omicron, perhaps you have been in a coma the past month or two and missed the news, but the number of Covid deaths in Australia has nearly doubled in the past month and a half, and the number of hospitalisations nearly quadrupled from the previous peak of about 1500 in September 2021. You say "we're still sitting around afraid to do anything" yet aside from having to wear a mask in indoor public spaces and being able to travel quarantine-free interstate, nobody is preventing you from doing anything. I have to wonder what world you've been living in if you think that the last two years have been incredibly restrictive here in WA, considering that most other areas in the world have had to deal with a much greater burden of death, health care system strain, lockdowns, mask requirements, and restaurant/bar closures. People I know from the US have asked me things like "have you stopped wearing masks" to which I respond that we never really started. Like it's become second nature to wear a mask outside of home for probably at least half of the people on earth, and here you are whinging that you had to wear one on the train or at the shops for a couple of weeks last year.

 

[Ilkka Sinisalo]

Yes.
1) Some poor bastards are going to have to front this on behalf of the state govt compliance crackdown
2) It's ridiculous and unnecessary persecution of a statistically irrelevant section of the community from a community health perspective.

Have you given any thought to my proposal that people should be given more freedoms to remain unvaccinated if they agree that if they get sick, then they will just stay home and die rather than putting an unfair burden on the WA health system?

 

[Ilkka Sinisalo]

LOL. You weren't up to it a week or two ago, now you are talking about me without tagging me. I don't know if I should be flattered or concerned.

You know what's selfish? Expecting everyone to put their lives on hold - indefinitely - because you don't want to acknowledge that your idol has no plan B after two years.

Put your **** on the block. Do you want things to go back to normal or not? How long is enough 'state daddy' protection? 3 years? 5 years? 10 years?

Where is this coming from, people saying that we will be closed until 2024 or beyond? It's pretty obvious that the state is buying more time to get more boosters into arms, considering that the booster shot has generally been shown to reduce Covid-related hospitalisations by 80-90%, even when the booster effectiveness starts to wane after several weeks or months. I think you should put your **** on the block and say "yes I'm happy to kill off hundreds more people and possibly cripple the public health system because I didn't want to wait an extra few weeks to be able to go to Melbourne." I guess your response will be that McGowan spent two years not getting the health system ready for Covid, and there probably are valid criticisms in this area, but the fact of the matter is that in a universal health care system, a lot of the care is done by registrars and interns and there's almost never any extra wiggle room in the budget, let alone for a once-a-century global pandemic.

It seems like you're defining "life" as "being able to travel interstate or internationally without any restrictions whatsoever." You might be surprised that other people have different priorities.

 

[Eastern Rangers]

Bizarre take.

Global air travel is a result of a globalised world.

People live in all different parts of the world for different reasons. There’s nothing wrong with that.

Saying it’s a privilege to spend time with ones family is an untrue statement. It’s part of life.

Wanting life to go back to basic normality isn’t bizarre. Nobody is expecting life to be normal. But heck. Australians can’t even handle using QR codes to scan into venues and have kids attend school wearing masks. What sort of bullshit is that?


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The problem with the above and what was my original point was precisely all the inbuilt assumptions of naive secular liberalism and for that reason I'm not surprised you find it bizarre.

Humans tribal animals that are designed to walk and most humans die within twenty miles of where they're born.

Yes people can choose to move and live a long way away. Such a move has always been with substantive risks. People have have never had the freedom or the right to move and travel where they want & when they want.

Far from Australians failing at the above interventions, is say theyve been more successful and there has been more buy in that Governments would have originally expected.











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[Balls In]

Have you given any thought to my proposal that people should be given more freedoms to remain unvaccinated if they agree that if they get sick, then they will just stay home and die rather than putting an unfair burden on the WA health system?

No. That is absolutely ridiculous. Slippery slope on steroids.

 

[Eastern Rangers]

This is a big reason why most other states changed the definition of contacts and reduced isolation time. I read today that WA will announce a similar thing today.

Regardless, looks like business will endure 2 months of pain once this thing rips.

Isolation is part of it. First part was simply not having the testing capacity for close contacts.

Other states relied heavily on private clinics testing for Covid. WA didn't use them initially and doesn't use them to the same extent, they charge the Government too much and under pay their staff compared to PathWest.

These labs batch tested for Covid which only works if there isn't a lot of virus in the community. NSW in particular lost a lot of testing capacity when the virus began to spread, private labs couldn't take shortcuts and extort the tax payers. So they simply stopped providing that service to all but corporate customers.

WA will run out of testing capacity long before we see labour issues. We shouldn't have the problem with RATs and the peak of the wave like over east.

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[Ilkka Sinisalo]

No. That is absolutely ridiculous. Slippery slope on steroids.

Ah, so you want people to be able to do whatever they want, remain unvaccinated and unboosted with no negative impact on their day-to-day lives, knowing that they are 20x more likely to require hospitalisation and ultimately overload the public health system and push other (vaccinated) people with non-Covid health problems further down the queue.

Not sure why people get upset when we bring up the US Covid situation given that all of the stuff that you want would obviously end up with Australia having low vaccination rates, catastrophic levels of Covid-related deaths and illnesses, and a health system on the brink of collapse.

 

[Eastern Rangers]

And then chortle at those who make similarly spurious analogues to 1930s Germany.

The level of cognitive dissonance is remarkable.

Base line shift in cultural and political norms hide substantive differences. Today we have a skeletal civic society, no common culture and a larger administrative state.

Where are the armed gangs of vigilantis enforcing curfews like they during the Spanish Flu? Storming the Capital and threatening to kill elected officials?

Conservatives must be right. Big government stripped people of their independence and in doing so made people stupid and ignorant.

Those complaining about the overreach of the liberal administrative state during the pandemic reminds me of this statement by Phil Ochs on the intro to his song Love Me I'm a Liberal. "ten degrees to the left of center in good times, ten degrees to the right of center if it affects them personally."

Where was the handwringing by the right over arbitrary, obtuse and punitive government prior to the pandemic?





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[Scotland]

That was a lot of words to say “Everything McGowan does is amazing and should not be questioned”.

There were very few community cases when we had mask mandates. You seem to be taking the outcome (little to no community spread) and then using it to criticise the government for having lockdowns and mask mandates.

No. You are taking the outcome of no community spread and using it to justify lockdowns and mask mandates as necessary and effective. It's 'my rock keeps away tigers' level stuff. If masks are so effective why do we have 177 cases?

Where is this coming from, people saying that we will be closed until 2024 or beyond? It's pretty obvious that the state is buying more time to get more boosters into arms, considering that the booster shot has generally been shown to reduce Covid-related hospitalisations by 80-90%, even when the booster effectiveness starts to wane after several weeks or months. I think you should put your **** on the block and say "yes I'm happy to kill off hundreds more people and possibly cripple the public health system because I didn't want to wait an extra few weeks to be able to go to Melbourne." I guess your response will be that McGowan spent two years not getting the health system ready for Covid, and there probably are valid criticisms in this area, but the fact of the matter is that in a universal health care system, a lot of the care is done by registrars and interns and there's almost never any extra wiggle room in the budget, let alone for a once-a-century global pandemic.

It seems like you're defining "life" as "being able to travel interstate or internationally without any restrictions whatsoever." You might be surprised that other people have different priorities.

Well we don't know when we will be closed until because the Premier doesn't want a repeat of the Feb 5 debacle. Nothing is "pretty obvious". Omicron modelling? Secret. Opening date? Unknown. Third vax threshold? Unknown, just vague statements around 90% being great with no time parameter. 'High caseload environment', undefined. I can't tell you how many people will die without knowing how many cases our hospital system can actually take at any one time - and guess what - that isn't publicised either.

I can tell you that SA currently has 23k cases and Qld has 64k. SA has had 110 deaths, Qld 183. If people have designs on WA not landing somewhere in that range then they are either hopelessly optimistic or extremely pessimistic. Independent omicron modelling out of UWA suggested a peak of 430 people in hospital and 43 in ICU, which is miles ahead of the govt's nonsense delta modelling which had peaks of 54 and 8 respectively (from a less contagious more serious variant). The stats are out there from other states. 430 in hospital and 43 in ICU would likely correspond to 40-45,000 active cases. If the health system can't handle that and/or the govt won't risk the number of deaths that goes with that then then they should be honest about it - which they won't.

I've met people older than me that don't own a passport and have never been outside WA. Good for them. Really has nothing to do with wanting a return to normal life without govt meddling.

 

[ep2018]

Any bets on when the border will come down?

I can't see it still being there after March.

McGowan would have given a date if the border was to open sometime in late Feb/March. gut feeling we wont be properly open for several months, with restrictions, type and length of quarantine etc easing every few weeks, until sometime in spring where people will be able to come in quarantine free.