there is a certain smug satisfaction in it isn't there. 

In all seriousness I hope they get on top of it. 

We need to have better controls for quarantine staff. 

The thing that I dont understand is why dont they live there. I mean, it is a fucking hotel

If we can have bubbles for this and bubbles for that, surely there are enough skilled and willing people to do a one month "live in stint" at a hotel to do the security, and then they leave subject to passing a full test

The way they do the odd shift and then continue their job as an Uber driver while indulging in 16 different venues in a 3 day period is baffling


On the other hand we can not, you know, declare one case as a state of disaster and throw everything into lockdown. The fact is any transmission passed during the next 5 days wont be detected during the course of the lockdown so apart from testing of known contacts already in isolation, it's a moot exercise

Australia's COVID response (excluding Victoria) pre November is much better than the responses including and since the SA outbreak. We have had over 9 months to put together a plan for the next 12 months. Instead all we have is to throw every single legal restriction at the virus and hope it goes away. Embarrassing really

Eat a dick, you’re taking 3k a week, we’re taking 1k. Source: The King of W.A.

Since when?  5 minutes ago that's when.

https://www.news.com.au/world/coronavirus/australia/coronavirus-perth-lockdown-nsw-restrictions-cases-numbers-victoria-and-qld-borders/live-coverage/5a1251ce0354dc501a808afe4e1f3235

Perth lockdown: Hotel quarantine allegedly 'run by cowboys'

So Western Australia have a real emergency. There are bushfires and people have to evacuate

So where do they evacuate to? What resources can they access? How do they tap into a network of friends and family? What about storage, repairs, supplies that simply arent available at food shops and other resources?

But making sure this one case isnt actually 100,000 cases is more important than maintaining a functional society for those who need one, ie, everybody in WA

Just goes to show how one sided this response to COVID has become. Month 2 of 12 months of madness and destruction. 10 months to go

In Adelaide there are regional areas whose local Emergency Departments closed in March last year to re-direct things to the covid response etc etc.

Almost a year later they are still closed and it's nothing more than governments taking the chance to save money in the name of Covid. It's a disgrace frankly.

The Barossa Hills Fleurieu Local Health Network has temporarily closed some of its accident and emergency services, where they are co-located with aged care facilities, to decrease the risk of transmission of COVID-19 and protect aged care residents in the Barossa Hills Fleurieu region.

That's still in force where my brother in law lives 11 months later. May not be all hospitals but certainly his local ED is still closed. He has been complaining for 6 months and now his two month old daughter had to be rushed to the ED 45 minutes away when he had one 5 minutes away pre Covid.

Covid: New Oxford vaccine 'ready by the autumn' to tackle mutations

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-55917793

If anybody wanted a definition for not practicing what you preach:
'This is one case. There is no need for people to panic, there is no need for people to be alarmed,' Mr Andrews said

Warm up tennis matches. Cancelled. Masks. Rules tightened. Return to work. Forget about it. Household gatherings. 50% off sale

By the way, dont forget to vote for the 9 month state of emergency power extension where everything done between now and 15 December will be done based on strict health advice and not for a minute longer than required

Time for the standard "thoughts and prayers" to be dished out our way so we can beat this outbreak


...I wonder if this means Victoria has declared itself a red zone??

So cause of corporate/media threats we have an Aus open that is going to bring stuff all money here? We have been through too much to please the advertising department and board members of channel fucking 9 and john alexander. 

I love how the Australian Open is being blamed for this. Victoria are accepting international arrivals everyday and the concentration of COVID in these arrivals isnt different to those who came over as part of the Australian Open. We have seen a breach of quarantine in QLD, WA, Vic, NSW and SA all within a 3 month period. When you are accepting thousands of arrivals each day it is a statistical inevitability

What Victoria is going through is not a result of accepting Internationals. It is failure to control a single case of COVID before it is declared a threat to the public. We saw this in WA. We saw this in QLD. And to some extent we saw this in SA

Fact is Victoria said they had a brand spanking new system in place that was going to guarantee there were measures and controls in place to prevent what we now have to endure. One that rivaled every other state and one that put us ahead of the game. Obviously that wasnt the case

Well WHO decides its not the bats, and its not the lab. But its frozen meat, you know what the Chines government been saying all along.

We know this because we have WHO investigator Dr Peter Daszak to tell us so:

https://edition.cnn.com/videos/world/2021/02/09/who-coronavirus-origin-wuhan-china-peter-daszak-interview-anderson-ctw-intl-ldn-vpx.cnn/video/playlists/coronavirus-intl/

He says the evidence comes from the work Chinese researchers did.... so..... you know we can trust it....why would Chinese researchers lie...

And indeed we can take Dr Peter Daszak words That The Wuhan Lab Didn't Do It.

He is completely impartial, even though he was the head of EcoHealth Alliance.  EcoHelath  "partnered" with...... the Wuhan Virology Institute.  You know the Wuhan Lab that is at the centre of the claims that it was the source of the virus outbreak...glad we have Dr Peter Daszak confirming his lab partner didn't release the virus...

EcoHealth received multi-million dollar funding from US National Institutes of Health (NIH), which was cancelled the Trump administration until ExoHealth provided the NIH with a vial of the SARS-CoV-2 sample that was used by the WIV to determine the virus’s genetic sequence. It also requested that EcoHealth arranges an inspection of the WIV by US federal officials. 

Dr Daszak called the requests heinous:

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-02473-4

All above board then and business as usual.

Yes it's sad.  The WHO lost all credibility early on when they succumbed to pressure from the Chinese not to declare it a pandemic.

They've got a mountain to climb now.

Chinese not helping matters either and acting like a bunch of cunce blocking and delaying investigators.

the WHO initial report had to say what it did to get the cooperation of the PRC.
PRC will now have to provide all the evidence for thier story, which can then be disproved by other member countries of WHO (ie UK porton down) and then asked what was the real cause

The WHO is a disgrace. 

https://www.theage.com.au/world/asia/we-may-never-know-where-covid-19-came-from-but-the-politics-are-just-getting-started-20210210-p5715m.html#comments

- "Embarek said the lab theory was ruled out after questioning Wuhan Institute of Virology staff about what they thought about the possibility. “They’re the best ones to dismiss the claims and provide answers to all the questions,” he said. He did not say if samples had been taken from the lab or provided by Chinese scientists."

Yes, of course  why would the WIV staff say it wasn't them that fucked up and let it loose on the world, other than they or their families being executed?

"Embarek said while accidents do happen, they were very rare and the laboratory incident hypothesis was “extremely unlikely"

- An outright lie.  These accidents happen and they are not rare:

There were more than 1100 breaches in just 4 years in the US alone that were a significant or bio-terror risk

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2014/08/17/reports-of-incidents-at-bioterror-select-agent-labs/14140483/

In 1977, a worldwide epidemic of influenza A began in Russia and China; it was eventually traced to a sample of an American strain of flu preserved in a laboratory freezer since 1950. It is thought the virus was derived in the lab from the 1950's virus.

In 2015, the Department of Defense discovered that workers at a germ-warfare testing center in Utah had mistakenly sent close to 200 shipments of live anthrax to laboratories throughout the United States and also to Australia, Germany, Japan, South Korea, and several other countries over the past 12 years

In 2019, laboratories at Fort Detrick — where “defensive” research involves the creation of potential pathogens to defend against — were shut down for several months by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for “breaches of containment".

I still can't get over  te appointment to the WHO investigative team Daszak, director of a viral research company that was funneling money to the very lab in Wuhan he and the WHO team is supposed to investigate, where up to $100 million dollars of funding is at stake.

Scientific American saw this coming:

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/bio-unsafety-level-3-could-the-next-lab-accident-result-in-a-pandemic/

Yes, yes it could...

And I thought FIFA was corrupt.

Sorry Western Australia, Ima let you finish, but....

Bumping this question from an AF thread about the Olympics because I've honestly never had it answered, let alone asked by anyone in the media to Scomo, as far as I know. Does anyone have an answer better than "it wasn't approved yet and they probably didn't want to risk the money"?

I just can't understand why not mass producing a good half dozen or so options as early as possible in advance of approval wasn't an obvious thing to do all along regardless of the risk of having to throw one or two or five of them out. Surely the money risk is nothing compared to the potential upside.

I once thought Australia was the country that got cracking on this sort of thing and helped out our Asia-Pacific neighbours, but now it seems we're not even doing enough to help ourselves. Now Scomo is getting doses imported from Europe where they really need them in case he gets in trouble for taking so long.

Nope I don't think there was any reason to not start producing the Astra Zeneca vaccine sooner. Maybe it took that long to retool manufacturing pipelines to the new vaccine? We couldn't start mass producing that many options though due to licensing issues and we also have no capability to build mRNA vaccines like Pfizer and Moderna's. CSL had agreements to produce the AZ vaccine and that one that UQ was developing (that didn't make it...). The Feds definitely tried to pick winners and they had the 2 aforementioned, Novavax and Pfizer. Pfizer they were slow to do a deal so haven't been able to secure many. We apparently have 50 million doses on order for Novavax and the trial had great results but they need to come from Europe and not until late this year. Hopefully that one can be adapted to the new strains before we receive them.

I think CSL is the only company in Australia with any capability to produce the vaccine. It was working on 2 - the UQ (which didn't make the cut), and the AZ one (which per Gyfox' post, they only started in November, and I assume CSL only got the rights around that time). So we had 2 domestic options, and the other picks were imports. We were slower in getting deals done with the Pharma's compared with other countries but we do have the luxury of time (relatively speaking).

I get that we are in a great place (thanks to the Premiers) with covid so we're able to take our time with the actual rollout of the vaccine, but I still don't understand the delay in production, especially considering we could have been making vaccines not just for ourselves but for our neighbours who could have used our help.

I think we are manufacturing more for the region. The delay in production is could be for a combination of several reasons (limited capacity, getting the agreement with AZ, retooling, etc). We are already working in a compressed time frame since normally, these things take years.

Must say I'm glad I live in NSW and not Victoria with regards these lockdowns you mob seem to be copping non-stop.

It was a five day long weekend lol

I'd accept that answer if CSL or someone in the know gave it. Of course I'm far from an expert, obviously the testing phase would normally take years, but I'm only querying about production. Would a manufacturer who is already making other vaccines and drugs really need six months to be ready for production, or was the leadership (or lack thereof) the holdup?

Yeah I think we're providing a few jabs for the Pacific. I would have liked to have thought Australia was the kind of country that rolled up it's sleeves and made enough doses for Southeast Asia for example, on the house.

Yes, I'm only speculating from the outside looking in. Not sure what the lead to produce a vaccine would be, but given the safety checks, need to scale up etc, I can see 6 months being a reasonable timeframe. I can see a lack of leadership or slowness in decision making holding things up but I can't see that being too significant.

This is a recent article about the challenges with the Pfizer vaccine which is an interesting read (different to the AZ one, but I imagine similar challenges exist): https://www.usatoday.com/in-depth/news/health/2021/02/07/how-covid-vaccine-made-step-step-journey-pfizer-dose/4371693001/

We're also pretty well supplied (only Canada, the US and UK are better) according to Nature Magazine, and I'm pretty sure we will be sharing the excess around: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-03370-6

I'm not going to be critical of you specifically but I find this highly offensive. The people who are supportive of the lockdowns and restrictions the most seem to be those who have comfortable work / school from home conditions, have kept their jobs, are economic and mentally sound, and can enjoy the time off

Nearly $3b was lost during this 5 day weekend and there are going to be a myriad of support packages and bail out packages to assist

Again, I'm not saying that you specifically have had it easy. I just think you need to understand that all restrictions large and small are taking its toll, especially considering Victorians have not gone a 3 week period between the last of the restrictions being lifted and new ones being imposed. And thats taking into account the ever shifting goal posts of our "COVID normal" which we didnt quite reach last year according to last years brochure but yesterday it was declared we did

Now that we are rolling out the vaccine it will be interesting to see how well that is done. 

The target is to finish by end of October - so basically 7 months. Assume that we are talking about  90% take up rate. to give 2 doses to that many people means that we need to give around 215,000 doses a day. Do we have a plan to do that. I doubt it.

Gladys saying today that NSW might get it done before the end of October. Agree that it's a big logistical exercise.

Sorry - that should have been 8 months