RATs & Vice

There are now supposedly more than 94,000 new Covid-19 cases nationwide. Official figures suggest that around 800,000 Australians have been infected by the virus.

“Realistically”, says strategic consultant Troy Bilsborough, a former health media adviser in the Abbott and Turnbull governments, “it is probably double that; it is probably up to 2 million.”

Opus Dei NSW premier Domicron

This all going according to Scott Morrison PM’s Plan. I believe we are now at Stage eleventy and Phase Q...

ABC News online reports: ‘NSW has recorded its highest number of COVID deaths in a single day since the pandemic began. In the 24 hours to 8pm on Saturday, 16 people died from COVID and 30,062 official cases were recorded.’

“Official”, meaning the actual rates of infection and death are much greater because, as noted before, NSW does NOT count positive RAT results. Victoria does and so its number of announced new Covid-19 cases is naturally higher: 44,155 new cases and four deaths as of this morning. ‘Of the new cases, 22,051 were detected from rapid tests and 22,104 were detected from PCR tests.' Health Minister Martin Foley said yesterday, 'that case numbers may be inaccurate in the coming days, as positive cases who undergo both a RAT and PCR test may be counted twice in the daily tally.’

No such concern in NSW where the government prefers not to know how bad it is out there. What’s more, it doesn’t want the public to know. But it can only get worse as the government discards even more precautions.

The Guardian online reports: ‘Close contacts of people with Covid-19 will be allowed out of isolation to work if their job is critical for food supply or emergency services under new rules in New South Wales. The state government announced the relaxation of restrictions to ease food shortages on Sunday as federal health officials revealed isolation rules may soon ease nationwide. With Omicron cases spiking in all states except Western Australia, requirements for Covid positive people and their close household contacts to isolate have caused staff shortages resulting in empty supermarket shelves. The NSW government said workers in the agriculture, food logistics, transport and manufacturing sectors who had been furloughed as close contacts would be permitted to leave isolation if their employer determined their absence posed “a high risk of disruption to the delivery of critical services or activities”.’

Scrotty from Marketing

ACTU acting secretary Liam O’Brien was dead right when he said “Forcing potentially infected staff back to work will only exacerbate the already rampant spread of the highly infectious Omicron strain throughout workplaces and the broader community, putting the safety of all Australians at risk.”

But Morrison and Perrottet simply do not give a shit about public health and safety. As if altering definitions is a rational health measure! As one commentator asked: “What will be the next definition change? Isolation will be now deemed as working from home? Hospitalisations are medical staycations? Positive results will now be call an unsubstantiated negative test?”

To quote a doctor in Victoria, writing anonymously (for obvious reasons): “This is the reality of working in an Australian emergency department over the last month. This week it has become especially stressful as the volume of Covid-positive presentations has increased – at least two-to-fourfold. The staff on whom it places strain include cleaners, nurses, administration workers and doctors… Unfortunately, due to the insane virulence of Covid Omicron, a large proportion of Australians is becoming infected very quickly and even though a small proportion of those infected will require hospitalisation, that number of patients on top of a consistent 95-99% bed capacity of most health organisations puts the hospital at breaking point.”

Living with Covid

This chaos is what the Morrison and NSW governments have unleashed on Australia for purely idealogical reasons. And it was all preventable.

“The idea that letting it rip – you know, taking a deep breath and puffing up our chest and just facing Covid head-on – would somehow be good for the economy, was always nonsense,” says Dr Jim Stanford, Economist and Director of the Centre for Future Work at the Australia Institute. “You can’t run a healthy economy without healthy people.”

Comedy crew The Chaser nailed it: “Government ensures low income earners don’t have to choose between buying rapid test or groceries by ensuring nobody can buy either.”

And here is an alarming comment regarding offical Covid-19 infection rates in Australia, posted by someone in The Guardian: “An update of the last few days of the discrepancy between cases reported in Australia compared to those reported at John’s Hopkins University. I still have no idea why we have these different tallies. Perhaps someone else does… a difference of + 60,561 new cases from JHU’s tallies compared to Australia over just 4 days.”

Sideshow Scott thought the reopening of NSW would score him big points. It blew up in his creepily smirking face and now he is trying to conceal testing failures and redefine what “close contact” and “hospital admission” means. For Fuck Sake!

With nauseaus reluctance I quote that asinine dickhead Tony Abbott, Australia’s worst prime minister until Morrison came along: “It’s only thanks to NSW Premier Dominic Perrottet that we’re still able to look forward to a decent Christmas.”

Now, because of the complacency and recklessness of the Morrison and NSW governments, the test, trace, isolate and quarantine system has collapsed and Australia is back to where it was two years ago.

 

 

 

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