Showing posts with label lockdown. Show all posts
Showing posts with label lockdown. Show all posts

Wednesday, July 21, 2021

Argentina and Adelaide’s Lockdown – Another COVID Tale



for my dear friend Rita in Rosario :)

Argentina and Adelaide’s Lockdown – Another COVID Tale

What does Argentina have to do with Adelaide’s lockdown? Well as it turns out, very little! Earlier in the year an 81 year old Adelaide resident, originally from Argentina, went back to Argentina for a visit with his daughter. This immediately begs the question - how did they get permission for this journey? There are few details made public about why they were allowed to travel to Argentina and back but the fact is hundreds of Australians have been refused permission to leave or enter the country.

However, the man and his daughter began their two weeks hotel quarantine in Sydney on their return. Towards the end of this quarantine period the man apparently had a fall in his hotel room and had to be transferred to a general hospital. He was COVID tested, found to be negative, and eventually discharged and returned home to Adelaide.

Some days later he developed breathing problems and together with is daughter presented with his symptoms at the emergency department of a local hospital at 2.30 am. What kind of person walks into a hospital with breathing problems in this day and age? What the hell were they thinking???? He was COVID tested, found to be positive, and immediately 57 emergency ward staff at the hospital are sent into quarantine and the emergency department shut down!

When this story was reported in the media we all started thinking it was another case of someone bringing COVID into Australia from overseas. BUT, it turns out the 81 year old gentleman caught the virus in the hospital in Sydney!! Because he and his daughter had been cleared of COVID in Sydney they just went about their normal life when they got back to Adelaide. Now he and his daughter and 10 other people in the community are infected, and thousands of primary contacts – from restaurants, schools, offices, shops - are in home isolation. And the entire state of South Australia is now in a 7 day stay-at-home lockdown.

So if the old man hadn’t fallen over in his hotel room this wouldn’t have happened. But he can’t be blamed. The virus was already raging in Sydney. It did come from overseas – an overseas aircrew passed it on to the driver of a minibus some weeks earlier and it quickly spread because the NSW state government were reluctant to enter lockdown. In the end they had no choice, but they were too late. By then the virus had spread through most Australian states and consequently I sit here in lockdown again.

COVID TALE II

 A friend of mine has been playing with some musicians for a few years and gradually developing a collection of songs they might eventually play at gigs. Recently a new member joined the band. When my friend went to this new person’s house for band practice the band were talking about COVID vaccinations and a couple of them were saying they would not be getting the vaccine. When my friend told the others he was already vaccinated he was told he was not welcome at the house because he would now be passing the virus on to other people in the band!! My friend has since left the band and is really disappointed. Three years of building up a repertoire and musical relationships down the drain because of dumbf***ery.

COVID-19: the gift that keeps on giving.

 

 

 

Saturday, September 12, 2020

The Victorian Lockdown and the Politicisation of the Corona Virus


Dear Friend,

I’ve been thinking a lot about the conversation we had about the Corona virus when we last spoke.

You mentioned a letter that Melbourne doctors had written to Daniel Andrews. As soon as I got back to my car I looked it up on my phone. And there it was at the top of the list of search results – from The Australian. The Australian is Murdoch’s flagship and I stopped reading it many years ago because I don’t believe a word they say. In the Australian context one of their primary goals is to bring down Labor governments everywhere, and they don’t let facts get in the way.

The next one on the list with mention of the doctor’s letter was Quadrant – a known right wing, conservative outlet. Interesting I thought. The only other reference to it was in The Chronicle – another Murdoch paper based in Queensland.

Then I searched the three media outlets that I regularly use to get my news – starting with The Melbourne Age.  Independent. Always has been The Age’s mantra for decades – and no mention of the letter.

So I checked the ABC – nothing. Then I checked the Guardian. Nothing. I eventually found the letter via Twitter at https://www.coviddoctorsnetwork.com/

I thought the letter itself was quite reasonable, and I’m not going to quibble with doctors who are working in this field.

But what worried me was the fact that The Age, The ABC, and the Guardian all had no mention of it. (And still don’t today a week later.)

Why not?? Do they think it’s fake news? Not worth mentioning? They don’t want to rock the boat, and present an alternative view? If that’s the case that would make them just as guilty of bias as the Murdoch press.

Whatever the reason it really worries me. In Australia now we are being fed news that is incredibly biased towards one side or another. If I read only the Age, the ABC and the Guardian I don’t even hear about this letter to Daniel Andrews. If I read the Murdoch press and watch commercial news or Skye news I am bombarded with it as part of their usual anti-Labor propaganda. And this is an example of how the whole COVID-19 issue has been politicised. Indeed just about every issue in Australia gets politicised in this same way. Unless you are making a conscious effort to consume news from a range of media outlets you risk being subject to propaganda and I think Australia is in real trouble here.

And of course filling in the gaps is the uninformed and opinionated morass of social media to further muddy the waters ….

Something else you said at our last meeting seemed to suggest that you didn’t think the reports of mass graves of people dying from COVID-19 or mobile freezers in NY being used to help out collecting the mounting number of dead bodies were true.  This quite stunned me. 

For the record, media outlets from all sides of politics provide lots of references to what happened in NYC:

NY Bodies

And similarly there are countless stories on mass graves for COVID victims from all sides of the political spectrum. I started searching stories about Brazil, but then found reference to similar situations in Bolivia, Iran and even the UK.

BRAZIL

BOLIVIA

UK

IRAN 

I mentioned an article from NZ that I found useful. It helped me realise that as a lay person my opinion on all of this is not worth much. It is just that – an opinion. And an unqualified one at that! The article, from a Professor of Epidemiology, is here if you’re interested.

The original letter from the 13 Victorian doctors has now garnered in excess of 500 signatures supporting their position. But I do wonder what the other 30,000 plus Victorian doctors think …

For all our sakes let’s hope that Victoria is soon through this nightmare.

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