DRINK ME posted:

I was reading about the car park grants and then going back to read about the sports grants that I mostly missed the first time around. Surely someone in the prime minister’s office has started a spreadsheet for hospitals and vaccine distribution centres in electorates they want to target.

freebooter posted:

It's what makes me most anxious about a world where we decide that vaccines are good enough and don't try to stamp it out any further than that.

hooman posted:

I have defeated you by giving you everything you wanted, thus making me the winner.

The Wimp-Lo of political parties, trained wrong, as a joke.

Laserface posted:

Yeah its not really unreasonable to not want AZ when you have a low risk profile.

all you are doing is helping the government achieve their made up goal of 70% of the eligible population (which is 50% of the population) vaccinated. once we hit that they will fully open 'er up and let 'er rip. make no mistake.

Im working from home, Im getting groceries delivered and im really only going outside to do exercise.

I dont feel like doing the bulk of the work on this uni group assignment so that scomo and gladys can get all smug about how well they handled the Delta outbreak. You want credit? do your fuckin job.

Comstar posted:

ATAGI is saying it will take months before they say that 12-15 year olds can get a vaccine. Thanks to the LNP, we don't have months.

hooman posted:

Just got a spam text from Palmer Party (with now no mention of Palmer)



Link contains no policies, just a video of Craig Kelly ranting over inspirational music and a "join our team" link.

slorb posted:

As a point of comparison the estimated ~1B a week cost of the current NSW lockdown is ~8% of the NSW GDP.

freebooter posted:

It was maybe possible at the start when it was a less virulent strain confined to wealthier and well-organised nations, but good luck getting war refugees in Afghanistan or subsistence farmers in Mali or flat-broke workers in Beirut to give a gently caress about COVID, they have bigger problems.

freebooter posted:

Which is why I said it was true at the start but is no longer true now.

If first world cities like Melbourne and Sydney with highly competent and well-funded public health bureaucracies can't eliminate Delta even with the strictest of lockdowns, good luck getting it to work in the overcrowded slums of Dhaka or Kinshasa or Phnom Penh, even if the political will to do so was there. You're dreaming. We are never eliminating COVID unless we develop a vaccine with sterilising immunity and even then it'll take decades.

Centusin posted:

Since August 23rd Ho Chi Minh City residents aren't allowed to leave their home except for essential workers in 11 different groups, and there are police checkpoints everywhere so documents are definitely being examined. Food is being delivered by community workers and soldiers, at certain essential offices and factories workers are having to work, eat and sleep there. No real sign any of it is working yet.

freebooter posted:

But at the same time - and I wouldn't voice this to them - that's already kinda part of life when you make the decision to settle down on the other side of the continent, right? My partner has a five year old nephew in New Zealand whom we haven't seen at all except over Facetime for two years now, but let's not pretend that we were going to be a huge part of his life when he's growing up in another country. If we have kids, they're not going to be seeing my parents more than maybe once a year. Neither we nor they would be able to afford to fly back and forth more often than that.

Eediot Jedi posted:

That's staggeringly stupid, unless you're specifically referring to people who moved away from family in the last year or so.

Launchpad McQuack posted:

Dude, turn off the tv and stay the gently caress off the internet for a little while. It has completely hosed your perspective. Or go and seek some mental help, gently caress me.

freebooter posted:

Yes. I put other things ahead of living near family, and I accept that in this situation that means I can't see them even semi-regularly (i.e. once a year or so) like I used to.

Solemn Sloth posted:

Pandemics wouldn’t be a thing if we all decided to live in self sufficient and isolated anarcho-primitivist compounds

Breetai posted:

Speaking as someone whose best friend (who I considered chosen family) died in Melbourne just after an earlier lockdown came down: it was awful beyond measure not being able to visit her in hospital and having to attend her funeral in a loving zoom call, but given the option to travel I would have unequivocally said "gently caress off" because I'm not a shithead plague rat and I had no intention of having to bury my mother, or partner, or anyone else because of a selfish desire to put everyone at risk by traveling during a pandemic.

gay picnic defence posted:

Also anecdotally via a client who works in the Vic contract tracing dept, they’re having huge problems with family gatherings and people not wanting to dob in people in attendance. The supermarket exposure sites aren’t too bad because they can ping the majority of attendees via the app but it’s taking them ages and multiple interviews to tease out the details of illegal friends/family gatherings. It’s a big driver of the mystery cases we’re seeing.

Launchpad McQuack posted:

gently caress this negative poo poo. What is everyone gonna do when they can do stuff again? Come people look forward to some good poo poo and I want to hear it.

StrangeThing posted:

What proof do we have that the majority of the spread is through people breaking the rules, and not through essential workers? Do we have that breakdown available?

ModernMajorGeneral posted:

I know this is largely just splitting hairs about what is 'normal' and 'common', but the point is that although enough Australians travel overseas regularly enough for it to be unremarkable, they are outnumbered by the Australians who don't do this, and people who used to travel overseas every year (including myself) should stop wringing their hands over how travel is part of the core Australian national identity or whatever.

Anyway, when the travel discussion came up it was in reference to it being uncommon for most Australians to go overseas in recent memory of 20-40 years ago, which is still true regardless of how many trips people were taking in 2017.

quote:

Where household tenure was known:

67% (5.4 million households) were home owners:
32% (2.6 million households) without a mortgage
35% (2.9 million households) with a mortgage.

JBP posted:

I don't know anyone that hasn't been overseas on a holiday. A lot of it is cheap stuff like Bali and whatever, but it's not like international travel is some 1%er concept alien to the majority of people. For some I'm sure it's a matter of will to go overseas. I'd assume that plenty of people with a stable income and cash to spend on luxuries don't go overseas because they just don't care.

StrangeThing posted:

Maybe! I don't think we know enough to say for sure though what the breakdown is.

In any case, there's not much that can be done. I don't really know of any other enforcement measures they could introduce at this point.

meteor9 posted:

I mean normally that'd be the result of the lovely media landscape but jesus christ have you seen the Fed and NSW labors these days? I assume the current NSW guy isn't quite as vocal about protecting our right to abuse dogs but then again I'd have to remember who the hell he is.

snickothemule posted:

Albo with real strong vice principal energy.

Fucks sake have a dig already, you might even enjoy it. Looking like a giant punching bag.

JBP posted:

A small price to pay for the freedom of millions.

Lolie posted:

https://twitter.com/MattWordsworth/status/1436143399397048326

Gladys is over, too. You can't pull a stunt like this when your approval rating is already in the toilet. Press is already savaging her on social media and the sharks will be circling in her own party.

hooman posted:

We don't discuss "on ventilator matters".

CAT INTERCEPTOR posted:

One of the worst Premiers ever, was utterly smashed by O'Farrell in 2011, helped backstab and then dispose of Nathan Rees who was a good Premier dealt a bad hand thanks to the assholes before him, connected to Tripodi and Obeid, more scandals than Morrison's mob, so utterly incompetent made Abbott look good, part of NSW Right.

LNP would be drooling at the very real chance stealing an unexpected seat back. What the hell are they thinking putting her anywhere close to a federal seat?

CAT INTERCEPTOR posted:

I'm not over 60 and I had utterly no hesitation to get AZ. Because the scares over blood clots in the media was loving ridiculous.

ilmucche posted:

that's certainly a thing. Is he a wild trump like right leaning dude?

Senor Tron posted:

$10 says that Biden remembers his name perfectly but also knows he is looking on shaky ground for the next election (until Morrison wins again because lol Australia) and remembers how much he was a friend of Trumps.

Lolie posted:

https://twitter.com/bridgerollo/status/1438653900664422403

Gladys is fronting a presser at 11 and expected to announce a rollback of hotel quarantine.

Lolie posted:

https://twitter.com/JoshButler/status/1440108049218228226

Illuminti posted:

Immigration is healthy, but there's got to be a discussion of amount. Unfortunately by denouncing anyone who thinks there is to much immigration as a racist the entire conversation has been ceded to the far right like One Nation and they unsurprisingly use it as a wedge topic and recruitment tool. There are other reasons besides hating brown people for wanting to lower immigration numbers.

Konomex posted:

Why is Australia both... hoarding globalism but also all of these people are effectively not from Australia?

The Peccadillo posted:

freebooter posted:

That can't be right, I have it on good authority from various whingers on Twitter that outdoor transmission is Impossible

Apparently Victoria has virtually no public pathology services and is entirely reliant on the private sector which starts getting backed up at around 60k tests a day. I presume we can thank Kennett for that one.

Putrid Dog posted:

That doesn't sound completely right. There's at least 4 public health districts and SydPath as a semi private lab.

Westmead, Nepean, RPA, Liverpool, John Hunter (Newcastle), Royal North Shore, St Vincent's and Prince of Wales all have a robust molecular pathology lab with smaller hospitals such as Concord and Lismore also having some capacity to perform testing. All these besides Sydpath in St Vincents fall under NSW Health, which while slightly decentralised from the separate health districts, doesn't hold a candle to the mess that Victoria is, where different hubs effectively operate as different companies. Austin, Monash, Melbourne etc are completely independent of each other.

Private labs in NSW include Medlab, Laverty, DHM, 4Cyte, Histopath and Australian Clinical Labs and are taking the lions share of the tests as they have the capacity to use their local collection centers for COVID swabbing.
Northern NSW will tend to have sample collections for QML and Sullivan Nicolaides due to being closer to Brisbane.

Laverty is part of the parent company Healius, so when there is an influx of samples, they'll send out their overflow to their sister sites such as QML or Dorevitch, and vice versa which is what happened during the Melbourne outbreak last year.
DHM is part of the parent company Sonic Healthcare and they do the same with Melbourne Pathology and Sullivan Nicolaides.

Covid testing is lucrative business, so path labs are chomping at the bit to get as much business as they can, so we've seen innovations as electronic test referrals, drive through collections, 24 hour turn around times for results.
They'll happily hire 20 new staff and contract new instrumentation in to pump in more samples and pump out more results.
The public hospitals aren't competing with that. Partly because government admin approval, sign off and hiring process is disgustingly slow, but they are still juggling all the other testing that needs to be done before COVID was a thing like bacterial sepsis detection, Hepatitis etc.

I'd agree that the main problem is that Melbourne just actually may not have as many labs or suitably sized labs that can scale up as NSW does.
There's at least 3 private labs (Medlab, Histopath and 4Cyte) headquartered in Sydney and may not have any presence in Victoria which would take a huge burden off any off the others.