The single biggest lie that is really pissing me off is "Our way out of this remains vaccination"

What a load of absolute shit. Vaccination still means we have to wear masks indoors, work from home where possible, no dancing or singing, and density caps

Even if we had 100% vaccination rates, which some places actually have, there is still going to be an abundance of caution and an overreaction to the hospitalisation figures every time they reach 25% or 30% of capacity. No to mention everytime an "expert" draws a straight line between two points and forecasts the apocalypse

So no. Vaccination isnt the way out of this. Sensible leadership and acceptance of reality is. Australia did their part last year. Now we are just waiting for the leaders to uphold their end of the bargain

Vaccination does remain a key pillar to getting out of this but it isn't going to be the only thing (and never was). We can go back pages to when we were discussing the vaccination targets to see it was never going to mean everything back to 2019. The high vaccination rate has prevented omicron induced large scale lockdowns.

This article is really worth a read

Isn't 50% of the hospitalisation and ICU from unvaccinated people (around 5% of the population). So hospitalisations would be 20 times higher if not for vaccinations. 

It may not be the only thing now...

But it definitely was billed as our way out previously. 
Most governments spruiked it. 
Ads were everywhere.
Perhaps the minor details were in the fine print, but the impression was "this is our shot to get back to normal" 

6 months ago
https://fb.watch/azEXgZlla4/

Yep ads run by the private corporation Channel 9 are an excellent example. 
Regardless, vaccination wasn't a waste of time it's allowed the borders to open and for us to avoid lockdowns despite huge case numbers. Things are far more "normal" than they've been anytime since early 2020. 

Mass messaging has to be simple, if people didn't bother to understand the finer details that's on them.  This shouldn't have been a shock to anyone, especially anyone engaged in this thread over the past year.

Yes and that doesn't take into account that the highest risk people (e.g. the elderly and immunocompromised) have even higher vaccination rates.

https://www.news.com.au/national/nsw-act/news/as-we-feared-antivaxxers-fill-icu-as-experts-reveal-the-total-impact-they-have-on-the-health-system/news-story/ce0fee1133545106883e122d5a369637

"One of the people in ICU is Mullimbimby-based tarot card reader and reiki master Helen Dean who had previously protested against vaccine mandates.She caught the virus last month and has been on a ventilator since Christmas Day.In the weeks since she first contracted Covid her friends have flooded her social media pages with healing sentiments and chanting ceremonies"

FMD......so why go to hospital now for treatment? 

Thanks for needlessly and selfishly taking doctors time

I'm surprised John Smith hasn't interpreted this as meaning that "you've got a 50% chance if vaccinated or not vaccinated because it's split down the middle" 

Ok. But media has been the governmenfs propaganda arm these days. 
Governments have been pushing it too 
What about this from Dan Andrews. 
Pretty blunt. 

"The roadmap makes clear that the vaccine is our only way through this.

its definitely a pandemic of the unvaccinated

the question is what do we do about the unvaccinated who are draining our healthcare resources?

Thats not true

Every state except for Victoria has been able to achieve an optimal normal life since March 2020 at one point

People could go to work, go to school, sing, dance, attend sports in large numbers. The only time they had to wear masks was in extremely high risk critical situations where the virus is at its most lethal like hospitals, aged care facilities, and buses. Even less than a month ago there was a better life when things first opened up

The trade off for the constant hysteria is work from home, disruption to school year, constant threat of 7 day isolation periods 4 weeks apart (just dont call it a lockdown), critical industries lacking staff, food shortages, face masks unless you are home or outside, density caps, scrapping of some industries like singing and dancing, lack of resources and a lifetime of uncertainty

Despite NSW hospitals being at less than 50% of Covid capacity, and about 1% of ICUs actually in use. If the 50% of unvaccinated people in hospital had been vaccinated and absent entirely, NSW hospitalisations would still be above the threshold that triggered the above measures (20%-25% capacity)

Things today are worse than they have been outside of lockdown itself, and that was mostly Victoria. Not sure how anybody from SA can say things today are a step forward from the life they had previously

The same response teams that hysterically slammed entire states shut over a single case are in charge of opening up. Thats why 95% vaccination and ridiculously low hospitalisations were never going to be the answer. There will always be something to overreact about

I dont think anybody is naïve enough to think this will be "over" or life will be "completely normal", but this should be about what are the minimal and vital measures that need to be in place. To protect the vulnerable who will be vulnerable for the next 10 years and to protect the elderly that will hopefully be the elderly for the next 10 years. This requires a real targeted strategy, not a bunch of superficial policy makers that dont even know what the objective is

The real naivety is those who think restrictions on the general public are designed to have a sustained and long term impact. That they are actually working today

All Covid responses should have been scrapped and replaced with a single national response aimed at resourcing the health and aged care sectors. Thats it. Thats where the testing kits should go. Thats where the management of isolation should be. Everything else should be optional and in line with work places / people's own strategies for managing their health as has always been the case

Vic has had zero cases for points in time too. During those periods, things weren't that different in the other states so if you felt suffocated by restrictions during those times it's quite possible you would have elsewhere.

"If you want to open up"  ✅
"Get back to normal sooner" ✅
If we weren't vaccinated we would be much further away from back to normal.

Zero cases doesnt mean zero restrictions

Victoria has never achieved a 100% work force throughout the life of the response and always had a mask restriction in some capacity since August 2020. I think there have only been 4 weeks since August 2020 where we were actually allowed in supermarkets without a mask. There have also been other social caps or limits in place in varying capacities

Victoria have always been in the process of repealing restrictions but we have never been in the same position as the other states. The closest we got was about May last year before our state went lockdown mad. I dont think we have ever reached the Covid normal box at the end of any pamphlet (unless Covid normal meant a work from home order for 25% of the population)

Thats the issue with precautionary restrictions, the gap between outbreaks are shorter than the gap between response teams declaring that the current threat levels are over

Here were Victoria's final restrictions before going into the last lockdown. The one and only time work places were at capacity and it lasted 8 weeks before restrictions reimposed mid to late May
https://www.dhhs.vic.gov.au/coronavirus-update-Victoria-23-March-2021

Cap of 100 people for homes (other states reached no cap)
Cap of 200 for outdoor gatherings (other states reached no cap)
Density limit for work places (other states reached no density limit)
Law to carry masks and ward of the virus like it was a Vampire, as well as usual transport rules (other states reached recommendation only)

This was the best we managed to get because December 2020 had a 30 people social cap and cap on work (25% or 50%) despite it being our "Covid normal", and 60 donut days

Maximum people and capacity limits were scrapped November last year (2021) as part of opening up, but vaccination passports were introduced and masks have been required in all indoor settings

There has been no normal in Victoria. Its just a case of a slap in the face is better than a kick in the nuts

You're missing the point. 
The message was vaccination is our only way back to normal. 
Now with 90-95% vaccination we are still nowhere near normal. 

They didn't say vaccination along with masks, restrictions, isolation, quarantine, check ins, vaccine passports is our way back to normal. 

Surely you can see the narrative has changed. 
It's quite obvious. 
That's the only point I am making. 

the problem is the anti-vaxers haven't allowed us to go back to complete normal

It don't think its the 5% remaining that is holding the country back. Can't blame anti-vaxxer for everything...

Bluebird's point is, vaccines were sold as the solution to returning to normal, but it is now apparent that this is not the case, since there are restrictions still in place to manage the ever changing virus.

facts are facts
the anti-vaxers are filling up the hospitals and ICUs...this is an established fact
that's why we still have restrictions

We're at 90-95% 16+, getting there with 12+ but we're still only at roughly 80% for the total population. 
The narrative has changed for a multitude of reasons, putting aside the new variant that has a reasonable amount of vaccine escape which wasn't there when they were on that narrative, vaccine targets have been achieved and have allowed significant amounts of normality to return.

Isolation and quarantine rules are actually pretty lax now, the TTIQ program has been scaled back hugely. In SA it's still 15 minutes but the standard seems to be 4 hours with a positive person to have to quarantine, and even then its for 7 days rather than 14. With the way they've scaled back TTIQ, I'm not sure why there persisting with check-ins but I guess it would be nice to know if I was in the vicinity of someone positive, the texts in SA at least take forever to come to the point of it being pointless.

The only point I'm making is the whinging to me isn't warranted, the vaccine targets have allowed a lot of things to be get much closer to normal. We can travel wherever we want (WA excepted), we can go out to most places, sporting events are happening and we can even have visitors to our homes.  This all with huge numbers of cases circulating around. None of the restrictions at the moment in place are as strict as they've been at their peaks and we're experiencing the worst wave of cases so far in this pandemic. This wave isn't going to last forever and things will scale back again. The plan was never full normality at this stage even before omicron, the Doherty modelling was there for anyone that wanted to read it.

I've been thinking about this recently.

My uneducated guess is that they want to leave the systems in place for future variants and likely for a long time to come.

I guess they figure if this Omicron wave ends and then a new variant comes around, we can try to get on top of it early again and people won't have gotten out of the habit of checking in.

Trouble with that is, I don't know anyone who is checking in properly anymore. Either coz they initially didn't want to isolate and now because we all know it's pointless. 

I think having these things in place when they are meaningless actually erodes people's faith in the system having the opposite of that (assumed) desired effect.

Also, it was even mentioned by (I think) the NSW minister/premier that they were here to stay in certain settings regardless of COVID which many of us always suspected but that's another issue.

more variants are inevitable

this is why we need quarantine and a more forceful way of dealing with the anti-vaxxers as the voluntary check-in system is full of holes

the construction of the centres for national resilience cannot come soon enough

Thanks for the nice one sentence summary of what has taken me so far 3 novels and a motion picture to try to explain. The only thing I'll add to that is it was a national expectation, not a minority one

The fact there was an explosion right across the country at the exact same time (despite variation in state plans) shows there was a national expectation to ignore the virus (as a 95% vaccinated population will do) and go about business as normal, stemming from the promise that if we reached vaccine thresholds we could open up. The Australian public created its own freedom day. These are the kind of promises a nation won't ignore or forget given how much was lost working towards it

Australia can't be blamed for opening up. Everything the country is going through stems from restriction heavy response teams trying to test, trace and isolated 100k cases a day and 3 or 4 times as many contacts. The national plan was to open up and response teams had months to plan a new approach. Instead its the same crap - masks, work from home, isolation orders, QR codes, vaccination passports etc...

I don't think they were though. Even the head of the AMA said they are only a piece of the puzzle.
The only ppl who have tried to sell that as the answer are politicians trying to get on the news.

the solution is many fold:

1. vaccinate the entire population
2. ensure the entire population are updated with the latest vaccination releases
3. track, trace and isolate as many cases as possible.  new variants are on the way and they'll be worse than omicron
4. implement the vaccination passport nationwide to ensure risks are managed when entering the community
5. construct national centres for resilience nationwide in as many locations as we can afford to allow us to isolate positive cases and/or the unvaccinated to take the pressure of our hospital system and allow it to return to a more normal operating environment

Australia's COVID response still remains the envy of the world.  Imagine the scenario if we'd let it rip early on.  Look to the 500k people that Trump killed in the USA as a result of that policy.

Yep exactly.

They haven't published an exposure site for 11 days in SA. Other states have openly said they're not publishing them anymore so if that's the case there really isn't any point. You're right though that after the wave ends and we go back to low numbers things may resume. Most people have seen how quickly things got unmanageable for SA health so yep it does erode people's faith.

Interesting article. 
Never seen it before. 

.....

True but unfortunately they (politicians) are who we hear from and ultimately who actually make the decisions so it doesn't surprise me most people did think this to be the case.

I know I did to a large degree.

Not because I didn't know there were health experts saying something else, or policy experts/opposition saying something else but because the actual state leaders whose job it is to make the call sold it this way directly to the public from their vanity pulpit