What's Up With Australia

Discussion in 'Coronavirus (COVID-19) News' started by LoneStarGal, Jul 8, 2020.

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  1. LoneStarGal

    LoneStarGal Well-Known Member Past Donor

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    I'm just catching wind of this (several days late).

    Thousands of people in public housing were suddenly put on a 14-day complete lockdown without notice. They can't even go out for food. Now they are complaining about not getting enough food, or expired food and not getting baby formula, feminine sanitary items, etc.

    Sounds very 1984 Orwellian. Anyone familiar with more details? Is this limited to people dependent on government housing and no one else?

     
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  2. LoneStarGal

    LoneStarGal Well-Known Member Past Donor

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    The "Towers" public housing is in Victoria. Now Melbourne locking down for 6 weeks?



    Ummm....
    upload_2020-7-8_0-17-45.png
     
  3. FatBack

    FatBack Well-Known Member

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    They totally sealed their borders, what gives?
     
  4. Steady Pie

    Steady Pie Well-Known Member Past Donor

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    Melbourne is a great city but the people there are completely insufferable. I'm unsurprised they are the epicentre of COVID in this country.
     
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  5. Steady Pie

    Steady Pie Well-Known Member Past Donor

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    I believe hotel quarantine was breached.
     
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  6. LoneStarGal

    LoneStarGal Well-Known Member Past Donor

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    Looking at 8,755 cases, and most recovered (7,455), and few deaths, it seems rather Draconian. Makes one wonder if there is something more serious going on there. Not that Covid isn't serious, but this seems like extreme government overreach. Maybe just because the U.S. has been relatively lax by comparison.
     
  7. LoneStarGal

    LoneStarGal Well-Known Member Past Donor

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    By visitors/tourists, or citizens? I just saw the first news clip on these developments in the last hour.
     
  8. FatBack

    FatBack Well-Known Member

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    If we sealed our borders, at least a couple members here would say that proves the USA is "xenophobic and racist".
     
  9. LoneStarGal

    LoneStarGal Well-Known Member Past Donor

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    The "Towers" public housing lockdown is the first instance I heard of so far where people aren't even allowed out to get their own groceries. Even Wuhan, China had grocery stores open during their lockdown. And why "just" public housing? Maybe I've missed some of the story.
     
  10. AmericanNationalist

    AmericanNationalist Well-Known Member

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    Indeed, but perhaps Draconian policies might be the only means the world has to defeat the coronavirus. I mean, 11 million cases all over the world, 3 million cases in the US. When this first began, I said I'd be shocked at 15K cases, LOL. Naive, little me. Now I'm willing to concede that they were right, right about everything including how to respond.
     
  11. Mandelus

    Mandelus Well-Known Member

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    Correct ... Australia had closed its borders but was correct and also decided otherwise, or continues to take drastic measures, for example due to renewed figures in Melbourne a curfew or a ban on reselling between individual states.

    For example, the entry ban for China, which came shortly after Trump's ban on China, was also a real entry ban. Australian citizens and others who were still entitled and who came back were tested directly at the border / in the air port etc. and put in quarantine!
    In the United States, tens of thousands came back and no one tested here and no one was put in quarantine ... and according to US law, the president = Trump is ultimately responsible for this, because border control is a federal matter and therefore something for which the President is ultimately responsible.

    But honestly ... all the drastic measures in Australia that help de facto and beyond a doubt ... would they be implemented in the USA? A curfew in major American cities, travel bans and border controls to enforce the ban between states in the United States?

    If I think of all the ... especially right wingers and Trumponians ... here, who are already complaining about the obligation to wear a mask, it is practically not possible in the USA ...
    Funnily enough, however, in all countries where it is possible to do the same or something similar to Australia, Corona handling works much better and as it does in Australia as in other places like the USA. Also in my country, where for example in a county in a large slaughterhouse around 1/3 of the employees (over 1,000 + then further and relatives = almost 2,000 people in total) were infected in a short time, the complete county became a complete quarantine and a total Lockdown imposed. That worked and the further spread of the virus was stopped considerably.
     
  12. Steady Pie

    Steady Pie Well-Known Member Past Donor

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    To put it in perspective, I live the same distance from Melbourne as you from Columbia if you're a Texan. The nearest city to me is almost 2000 miles away. Therefore I pay more attention to local issues.

    What I'm trying to say is I don't know :applause:
     
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  13. bigfella

    bigfella Well-Known Member

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    OK, a bit of information is clearly needed.

    The whole of Melbourne is going into lockdown tonight. That means people can only go outside for work (if they can't work from home), food shopping, exercise, school (if parents haev to go out to work) and if they are caregivers. Last week a collection of Melbourne postcodes with COVID clusters were locked down, but after we detected 191 cases on Monday the wider lockdown was decided on. It will last 6 weeks. At this point it does not apply to rural Victoria, though the border with NSW to our north has been closed to all except locals.

    The nine tower blocks you highlighted were singled out because there were clusters in seven & the other two had a lot of interaction with the seven. No other tower blocks in Melbuorne are impacted. They were completely locked down Sunday and all residents are being tested. That testing has thus far detected 75 cases out of about 3000 people (I think). Testing should finish tomorrow or the next day, after which those who are not infected will be under the same rules as everyone else in Melbourne. There have been some issues with the way this was managed. It was done very quickly, which meant that communication with residents was poor. This has been exacerbated by language problems - because this is government housing it has a higher than average percentage of refugee families. many also come from places where seeing the police surround your building means something even worse than lockdown. There have also been some problems with food distribution, in part due to cultural factors and partly because the first food delivered was from charities that 'reclaim' food, meaning some had expired dates (but was safe to eat). These issues have largely been sorted at this point, though many residents are quite rightly upset.

    Just to give some detail, we had about 150 cases Sunday, then 191 Monday and 140ish yesterday out of a population of about 6.3 million. Most of those weer community transmission. That is with us doing 20,000+ tests per day (yesterday it was 29,000). There are suburbs where testers are going door to door. The vast majority of cases are either asymptomatic or with such mild symptoms that they would not normally have been detected. There are currently about 50 people in hospital and 10 in intensive care. We have had a total of 22 deaths since this started. You can make comparisons with US states to get some perspective on this, but the situation here isn't as dire as the coverage might suggest. The problem is that there are next to no cases in the rest of Australia, so we need to knock this on the head for everyone else's sake.

    The wider issue here is that our quarantine system failed. While I'm pretty sure we stopped all foreign travellers coming in, we still permitted Australian citizens (and possibly Permenant Residents) to return. That is pretty standard for most nations, including the US. People returning had to go into a 14 day quarantine in hotels located in our major cities. Unfortunately the quarantine in Melbourne was mostly enforced by security guards rather than police or military. Numerous security guards failed to follow the rules. The fraternized with people under quarantine, sometimes in their rooms. They failed to socially distance among themselves and they failed to socially distance outside work. Some attended larg family gatherings, at least one did so after he knew he was COVID positive. From there it spread among other people...and so forth.

    The government has accepted responsibility for the failure. While it was reasonable to expect that people hired to do a particular job would do it properly, it is also resonable to assume that better trained personnel such as police & military would have followed the rules better. People here are NOT happy, and the government is fortunate that the next election is years away.

    So, that is the basics. Happy to answer any further questions.
     
  14. FatBack

    FatBack Well-Known Member

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    I have one...

    (cut your post I'm not responding to)...

    Why is it OK for an entire Nation to close ALL borders but not other Nations?
     
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  15. bx4

    bx4 Well-Known Member

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    Straw man.
     
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  16. FatBack

    FatBack Well-Known Member

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    Ummm, no, it's not.
     
  17. bx4

    bx4 Well-Known Member

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    Prove it.
     
  18. FatBack

    FatBack Well-Known Member

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    I'm going to the laundry mat, dont have time for you, maybe in several hours.
     
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  19. bx4

    bx4 Well-Known Member

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    Can’t back up your straw man. No surprise.
     
  20. nopartisanbull

    nopartisanbull Well-Known Member

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    Australia has 8,886 cumulative confirmed cases, and 106 deaths, thus, their death rate per Covid19 positive is 1.2%

    And for anyone’s info, the United States has THE LOWEST death rate per Covid19 positive......MAGA!
     
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  21. ronv

    ronv Well-Known Member

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    I'm trying to figure out if that's a good thing. :)
     
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  22. Woogs

    Woogs Well-Known Member

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    No, it's not. Normalizing populations, the US has 100 times the COVID deaths as Australia.
     
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  23. bigfella

    bigfella Well-Known Member

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    Sorry, I should have specified relevant questions.
     
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  24. bigfella

    bigfella Well-Known Member

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    Update on the towers. Testing finished last night. Results will be in today. A decision on what to do next will follow.
     
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  25. FatBack

    FatBack Well-Known Member

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    Well, be sure not to ask any. Then you will be absolved of that pesky need to produce answers.
     

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