Jeepers. Yeah it just seems like it is going to be too stressful to go anywhere. Lucky you at least got some sort of holiday in.

I read my post back just then... wow, English is my first language,  i don't know what language that was. 

I'm not sure how people can blame the government for the EU blocking shipments of vaccines that we've already paid for. 

Who's blaming them for that? They haven't rolled out the vaccines they have received!
I'm 100% for "helping our pacific neighbours" as well but we've so far sent 8480 of our supply of vaccines to PNG and asked the EU to release the ones they blocked from us to send them to PNG. How much of a dent is that on our supplies? Insignificant.

We've received 4 million at this point?

They're going into lockdown because there are cases being found that have unknown origin. That's a worry as there could be more cases out there. The lockdown is to stop the chain of transmission and let contact tracers catch up and isolate the people at risk.

At what stage can we guarantee it? Probably not until we're nearly at the end of the rollout. What will happen is that these situations will become far less likely as the percentage of people vaccinated increase. At the moment you still have people in contact with returned travellers and working in the health system still not vaccinated. Madness

No but we've got over a million and only administered 500k. If we had run out of vaccines to administer then I'd accept that argument.

Not to mention the PNG thing has been cooked up extra by the PR team, trying to imply they've slowed down beacuse given them all to PNG to help them, when in fact they actually hindreed them at first;

If a three day lockdown followed by 11 days of template restrictions was effective this thing would have been done and dusted globally after 14 days

What Victoria proved last year is that this is a social disease. If there is a way for one person to interact with another, and so far under every situation and rule that has been the case, then this thing can spread. And while computer simulations show that if chess pieces arent at school or in super markets the virus cant move, they are just that, simulations. As much as people think they do, many people have no idea of how this spreads or what dangerous momentum looks like because so far the only data we have been analysing is those of the hardest hit countries instead of our own

Contact tracing breaks down the chains of transmission because you are isolating secondary or tertiary related contacts with a direct link to somebody you know is infected because people literally cant get it from anywhere else (when there are a small number of cases). But this thing takes time to present itself. Its not the immediate response people are hoping for. How can you isolate people for 14 days and quarantine people for 14 days but then lock down a major city because there wasn't 0 cases after 48 hours?

Every snap lockdown has been needless. Australia already has a natural less than 1 r rate in the community due to high levels of compliance. Not only that but we have a quarantine system more effective than a vaccine. What we have seen time and time again is 0 cases is impossible. What we have seen time and time again is there will be gaps in identifying the chains of transmission. Australia does not have an answer for its set of circumstances and time is running out. No more job keeper. Shorelines cant stay shut forever

I understand your frustration with a slow vaccination program but we know it was never going to be 100%. You know that there are unused vaccines but you dont know why. It could be those who are entitled arent willing which we know will be the case for 10%-30% of people. It could be logistical issues because people are too far from the vaccination centers. It could be due to any number of circumstances. I find it hard to imagine there are crates of these things sitting around and nobody has been bothered to issue them. In the same way this virus didnt pan out the way we thought it would (for the better) you also have to take initial estimates of vaccination results with a grain of salt

All we can do is live in the here and now. And right now only NSW seem to have a plan for today

Yep absolutely. Neoliberal madness.

Astrazeneca initially banned for seniors in Germany but now it'll be given to those only over 60. 

It's incredibly frustrating. The start had mass celebrations of how all the orders had been made with numbers in the hundreds of millions. They forgot to tell us the product hadn't been made nor was there a logistical plan to deliver and administer it.

Is it legit that we've only just vaccinated 15% of the actually amount of people that were to be vaccinated by now. 
I feel like it's not the truth because it should be a bigger deal than people are making it. 

People here keep playing it down. It's just bizarre. Even Berejiklian and Hazzard in NSW have come out today to criticise the Feds for their handling of it.

Its crazy, i have an old football teammate who's a doctor in barwon health and he and alot of the people he works with are yet to be vaccinated but our fuckwit neighbour who doesn't work got vaccinated last week, meanwhile my wifes just been told she can get her vaccination and she is a dental assistant. Complete shitshow.

I agree. The roll out has been pathetic and there needs to be more complaints. 

Music festival cancelled over 1 case, and masks mandatory because thats what health officials said would be important at the start of the pandemic. As much as I say NSW are leading the way, they are still leading the way with the old tool set

Gladys said that we should be reaching a stage where this is about number of people in intensive care instead of daily numbers. When do we see it?

So you can hold sporting events where 10's of thousands attend but not a music festival.  You can see where the lobbying power sits in NSW and VIC.

Its one of those situations where if it goes ahead and a positive case attends all of the captain hindsight types will be out in force. 

Couldn't agree more about the leeway sport has been given.

Horrible situation for the local economy, event organisers etc. 

Are the sporting events that are going ahead in the Byron area?

I get the unrest and disappointment by the Bluefest organisers/small local biz etcetc But I'm all for canning it tbh.
Damned if you do damned if you don't......
At least I'm more assured that a possible infection outbreak has been nullified that could close our State followed by border closeures living a restricted life.
Forget the 1 infection, its the amount of toursists from all over congregating in Byron, those from Briz etc more so.
That type of event has no comparo to a sporting event ie gafl/nrl/our al etc.....to me.

Not sure if that's the issue, more that sporting events went ahead in Sydney and elsewhere even when there were a fair few local cases.

If the virus can spread from QLD to Byron then why are people so confident it can't leave Byron?

NSW opted not to shut their borders to QLD when this thing first happened which they shouldnt have done if they didnt have a plan for a case (sorry for the over use of the negative). No different to Victoria at the end of last year who also left their borders open, and then punished the whole state

If NSW can host major events then they should be at a stage where a small number of cases or even a minor outbreak can be managed. Suppose this person hadnt tested and did attend a major sporting event or the music festival? Its an every day risk, not just today, but right through to October

Every major event should be COVID safe anyway. This is just an overreaction

Byron Bay & the surrounding areas is a hotbed of anti vaxxer covid conspiracy idiocy. Having that particular festival in that locale with many visitors going in then out with the prevaling dopey attitudes towards covid & vaccinations & modern civilisation in general means that the festival shouldn't be held there.  Or any large scale gathering. 

If you cannot have a music festival fair enough. You cannot then not have sporting events. 

I have to disagree. I love Bluesfest but you are comparing apples and oranges. A sporting event where you sit in one seat is akin to going and watching something like Hamilton. Cleaning of the venue is done between performances. Bluesfest has thousands of people wandering from stage to stage continually.

Feel sorry for the businesses that were looking for the last big week before the quieter season.

This virus doesnt operate like a video game. Its not like one piece touches another piece and then you have an infection

Look at the sheer number of venues infected people visit, yet we dont see 10-20 people per venue infected which is what we would see if that were the case. In fact the WHO even said planes are safe, its what happens when you get off the plane. The reason why Adelaide overreacted last year was because they thought it had been transmitted via a pizza box which was a game changer, but that was false information

Early estimates were 15 minutes of close contact for 2 hours and even with the new variants we still dont have a super bug. They still havent reported how 20 people walked into an alcohol store and ended up infected. Italy's main infection came from a football match in Spain where there was lots of hugging etc... Weddings and parties are also a primary infection source (Yet Australia are still targeting shops and public transport, as well as using face masks as its primary tool)

Big events are an issue because they arent localised and involve lots of strangers. The absolute worse thing for this virus is region to region transmission. But big events when done COVID safe (break up families, no mosh pit, social distancing etc...) in a country with minimal to no infection it just means at worse we have a few seeded outbreaks like we saw in NSW last year. Hit it with a team of contact tracers and its gone after 4-5 weeks

I would argue sporting events are worse because you are seated next to a stranger for more than 2 hours breathing in the same oxygen. But as I said, we dont have any real cases and the damage done in the event of a case is just a few weeks of being on high alert

NSW last week managed to get as close to pre-COVID conditions as any state has managed and set up a framework for the next 12 months at least. Every thing from that point should have been about numbers hospitalised and isolating 2nd or 3rd tier contacts in the event of an outbreak. Other countries are being overwhelmed by this because they have repeat sources of infection and an exponentially high number of cases that stems from infections being seeded nationwide for several months. We arent there yet

BluesFest attracts people from all round the country so region to region transmission is a real risk. The point is not the length of time of contact (yes that is a consideration in whether you do get infected). The point is that it makes it virtually impossible to contact trace.  

I understand your point. But sporting events are also nationally attended. The Blues Festival carried no more risk than any sporting event

The thing about the Coronavirus is that if its entirely invisible with no symptoms then what are we worried about? The reality is at least 20% will experience rough symptoms and 5% will need to be hospitalised. We are also testing front line workers, the only real source, every 1-3 days. This virus has always been discovered within 7-10 days of somebody being infected. Even last year in Victoria they knew early June about the infections from the end of May

If somebody walks into the hospital tomorrow in South Australia with the virus, you are right, you won't know the source. But you can contact trace around them and isolate their secondary and tertiary contacts and snuff out that source. If you then find out they were in NSW at a festival, then you can issue alerts for everybody at the festival, and test around them. A break in the chain doesnt mean 100,000 cases we don't know of

NSW managed to get to 200 cases in total and it was never too big to manage. Even when they reached about 400-500 last year in winter it was never too big. We're not like the other countries where every day they are loading vehicle after vehicle of infected people into their country and letting them disperse. We have a single branch stemming from one patient zero and a natural 0.3 reproduction rate. The Ruby Princess was national but even that capped out at about 800

Victoria were the exception, not the rule. Our shorelines are shut and the impact of the initial 4000 people we let into our country has long been eradicated. Everything from this point on is pissing out spot fires. If we acknowledge that this virus is an evolving beast then its also critical our responses change too as our circumstances do. Trying to beat this to death with lockdowns and facemasks has seen 5 or 6 needless "precautionary" lockdowns in as many months. And we have 6 months to go before ~70% of people are vaccinated. It just means no resources when there is a real outbreak, a different disaster, or compliance fatigue

Everything from here on out should be managed with SMS alerts for impacted regions and isolation / testing of key contacts. Australia discreetly switched to an elimination approach which has proven to be a failure and its time we shifted back

Usually your posts on this matter are well-argued even if I disagree, but that's outrageous. We all saw the mass graves in other parts of the world. We've got almost 3 million reasons to worry about it.

I dont think you understood the point. I was saying if the Coronavirus didnt have any noticeable impact and could operate entirely behind the scenes without being noticed then there wouldnt be an issue. But that isnt the case. 20% of people will experience definitively noticable symptoms and 5% will be hospitalised. Thats not something that can operate under the surface

The fact is if there is an outbreak we'll know pretty quickly when the numbers are small and manageable