They are also shutting the schools again. Is that an evidence based decision? A thoughtful approach would have left the schools open and a 2-3 week shutdown to see if this is a trend or a blip. But what’s happening is that no one wants to get blame for a single covid death. If a few more people die of heart attacks or drug overdoses, so be it.
As I understand, and I think there are Melbournians among us who can correct me, current school holidays are being extended by a week, but special education schools and students working to the big high school exams are coming back as normal. That’s a nuance from last time, likely risk-based.
There were lots of arguments about whether to keep schools open. The govt’s view was that they were low level transmitters, but had more important role in allowing parents who were essential to making the lock-down work actually be able to work.
That’s what they already had been doing. The conclusion was it’s a trend and not a blip.
I’m blaming the BBC on that one. They really didn’t make clear this was a week of rising cases. Still think 6 weeks is over the top.
2 weeks for the current cases to recover and pre-symptomatic sufferers to become symptomatic, then an additional 2 incubation cycles at 2 weeks each as a buffer.
Sounds right to me.
Six weeks is eminently reasonable. And believe me, I’m salty as anyone over the fact that we’ve all got to goddam stay in our goddam houses again, but the choice is pretty much “stay home and kick this thing while there’s still little in the way of cases”, “stay home for just as long, only with a two week delay and a whirling maelstrom of death going on all around you” or “give up”.
This is not in any way a surprise to anyone who lives here, since we’ve been watching the cases go up for about a week and a half now. A disappointment, sure, but not a surprise.
They were trying to ring-fence the suburbs in which the contact tracers knew there were cases, but it didn’t work - Melbourne’s too connected. It’s just unworkable to expect that infections will stay within a postcode, when you’re letting people out of the postcode to go to work every day (“if you can’t work from home”). Ring-fencing the city is much more reasonable, and means the rest of Victoria can still stay pretty normal.
It’s possible that having schools back was a contributor to this. One of the big clusters is school-connected. We’re just coming towards the end of two weeks of mid-term break, and before that, schools were fully back for four weeks - that’s pretty compatible with schools having been an infection contributor, given the incubation period.
Authorities haven’t actually said “we’ll be keeping all the under-16 schoolkids at home too for the 6 weeks” - but I’m pretty sure that’s what will end up happening.
Bugger it. 
The number of no brainer protocol breaches has been a continual worry.
The JetStar flight to Sydney that nobody thought to apply the basic protocols to
The recent Bangladeshi arrival who tested positive in Melbourne, was allowed to take a train to Sydney and tested positive again after working a shift in Woolworths in Balmain.
Steele Sidebottom emulating Alan Didek in showing how much can go wrong when Collingwood footballers get pissed and get into a taxi.
The pre-COVID shutdown beach parties.
The collective Aussie “we” have dodged a series of bullets with plumb good luck.
School openings were the single biggest point of argument between the States and Commonwealth. Victoria lead those who wanted to schools closed for all term 3. NSW et al wanted phased openings. It seems kids up to 16 are less susceptible but it’s the teachers who are most at risk. The various state positions reflected how much sway the Teachers Unions had with their State Government.
The extended PT family all reside along the Murray border and several who live in Moama and work in Echuca or vice versa were discussing reciprocal house swapping to minimize the disruption.
This seems to be the appropriate place to ask: I recently saw a breathless social media post that says that an entire apartment building in Victoria (IIRC) is locked down with NO exceptions (I think with police/military enforcement) for what are implied to be racist/classist reasons (because the residents are mostly immigrants) and this is being downplayed in the media as being necessary because “those people” can’t be trusted to quarantine. Any truth to any of this?
Apparently 9 public housing towers were forcibly locked down.
Edit: having issues with the link.
Google “Listen as those locked down in Melbourne’s towers roar”
Yes, the ‘targetted ringfencing’ strategy developed as follows:
First, they put a bunch of suburbs where there had been COVID clusters back into Stage 3 restrictions - you can go out to buy food, exercise, provide/get care and if you really can’t do it from home, work/school. I personally think that last exemption was wrong for a ring-fencing strategy, but whatever 
When they discovered some more cases in the public housing towers, yes, they imposed a stricter lockdown, but for a much shorter period. Can’t go out at all, for anything, till everybody in the tower block was tested (5 days estimate) and the authorities committed to provide everyone with groceries/necessities for that period. That hasn’t been executed absolutely perfectly or efficiently, but they had a big catering operation ramp up extremely quickly to make pre-prepared meals and so on, so yeah, they were shipping a lot of food and stuff in, but people did fall through the cracks.
Residents reactions to the situation range from “well this sure sucks but I don’t want to get COVID and this IS a high-risk place” to “WTF, we’ve been telling them for months we need help and now they send the police in???”. I personally think there’s a degree of implicit racism in the fact that the tower-block lockdown was as extra-strict as it was. If it’s okay to keep about 10,000 tower block residents away from work for a week, with no notice, then how come the hotspot postcode residents got to go out to work - even if their work wasn’t an essential service? I think there’s a bias there - “oh, well, public housing tenants - whatever they do for work it can’t be that important.”
The two main groups of public housing tenants are recent refugees, and long-term citizens with mental health issues. It’s a reasonable assumption that very few people have a particularly highly paid job, because your rent is based on your income (I’m not sure what happens with adult children still living at home, but the flats are pretty tiny) so there’s an incentive to move out if you’ve got a good stable well-paying job. They’re absolutely a huge COVID risk though, because they’ve got hundreds of flats served by just a few lifts, and you can’t swing a cat in there.
A copy/share post has been going the FB rounds regarding the tower lockdown - this is apparently from a healthcare worker involved in the testing. People in this thread might be interested in it
(it’s a little cheesy. sorry 
)
Each of these ‘little boxes’ in the locked down Melbourne Towers holds a story. Someone who matters. We are listening and we care.
The past 2 days I have had the privilege of being one of a team of nurses from Knox Private Hospital providing Covid swabbing for the residents of the Towers.
This pandemic brings out the best in some and the worst in others. These past two days I’ve been lucky to see countless examples of the BEST!
Day 1 at Flemington Towers the Co-ordinator expected a team of 14 nurses, he had a hundred or more instead, and a plethora of Paramedics as well. None of us knew what to expect going in. Media reports certainly have done nothing to allay anxiety.
There was a lot of time waiting for final permission to proceed whilst safety concerns and logistical issues were ironed out. As we waited we could see faces at various windows watching our preparations. We waved and blew kisses which were returned with joy.
Each team that went in had members of our wonderful Victoria Police as escorts for protection which thankfully wasn’t an issue as there was no threat directed towards us at any time.
Our team used every door knock as an opportunity to do a welfare check. We asked the question R U OK.
My heart (and my eyes, truth be told) is overflowing from the reactions, the love, the gratitude shown by these beautiful people we have met. Yes they are frightened and some are angry, honestly who isn’t? But the vast majority were fully understanding and accepting of why they have been placed in such tight lockdown.
Reports that they have no food/supplies are totally unfounded. In the words of one lovely young man “my fridge has never been this full before”.
We listened, we cared, I hope we made a difference. Almost every resident was eager to be swabbed (some had already been swabbed in the last few days). They are worried about their jobs and how long this will go on. Unfortunately those are questions we couldn’t answer for them.
There is a veritable army of wonderful support people working tirelessly to make sure these people are receiving everything they need both physically and emotionally.
We had Interpreters, Social and Mental Health Workers all available to assist.
Requests for medications or specific dietary needs were relayed and being met.
Again and again we were met at the door by thankful, wonderful people who were as much worried for our safety and well being as their own. Our hearts were melted by sweet cheeky little ones peering round Mumma’s legs at these funny looking nurses in PPE. We shared a bit of our lives with each other and connected in those moments.
It’s funny how little details stand out in the midst of crazy times. At the end of the day yesterday as we packed up our trolley of supplies I saw the tissue boxes on other trolleys were exactly like mine. Each one had hastily scribbled ‘requests’ inscribed. Such as No.X-eggs and bread, No.Y-Colgate Toothpaste & Pads, No.Z-onions & tomatoes. Rest assured we passed on those requests and kudos to the male police officer who went back to hand deliver the sanitary pads that one of the Social Workers happened to have with her when we went back down stairs.
Together we can make a difference.
#staysafe #staystrong #wecare #proudtobeaustralian #covidsucks #theyhavetoiletpaper
Edit: Feel free to share. Positive vibes are well worth spreading. Xx
They are also shutting the schools again. Is that an evidence based decision?
The state government employs the teachers in the state school system, and is both responsible for them and dependent on them. The school teachers really really didn’t want to go to work last term – they regard students as germ-ridden vectors of disease – and the employer didn’t make that demand.
Medical advice was that closing the schools wasn’t necessary. But in truth, they didn’t know that much then, and the medical advice was predicated on the belief that they should keep the schools open to provide child-care for the children of the nurses who would be needed in the overwhelmed medical system.
We are in a new situation now. Before, we had an international epidemic with no local disease: just sick people returning from overseas. Now, we have a local outbreak, and pausing two weeks to avoid an epidemic is a reasonable response given the unknowns.
We still don’t have hard evidence on the utility of closing schools, we are just assuming that kids in a classroom are the same risk as adults in a restaurant or meat-works, but the political opinion is that keeping kids home from school is a low-impact intervention, so it only needs a low level of medical justification.
The school teachers really really didn’t want to go to work last term – they regard students as germ-ridden vectors of disease
This is a truely appalling attitude … and also biologically correct even in the pre-COVID world. The difference now is the vectors can bring in a pathogen the teachers don’t have immunity to.
For the record, with the widening of the lockdown to cover all of Melbourne, eight of the nine towers were opened [i.e. there was no difference between their status and the immediate outside world any more], while one remains in harder lockdown.
Your Facebook post captures what i’ve seen a lot of in the past few months - vast amounts of generosity, patience and empathy with strangers. Would be a great legacy of this experience if that lingered on and became a habit.
It’s now mandatory to wear a mask in Melbourne. Until now Australia has not requested masks at all, aside from if you had symptoms of any kind of illness, as the numbers were low enough to not see the need, but now the case numbers are getting high again, worse than in the initial wave, and masks are being enforced, with a fine if caught without one.
So that’s a definite sign things are bad, and could get worse before they get better.
Reports from my doctor friend at the RMH last week were that, out of a possible five dedicated COVID wards planned in case of a surge, they’ve had to so far open just one - “but it’s pretty full”. So certainly health workers are going to be under the gun.
I think this coming week will tell us if we’re going to get things under control or not. I’m hoping for a peak under 500 sometime before the weekend, then a long slow slog downwards - I think that’s do-able.
I’d be pretty nervous if I were in Sydney right now. They’re looking like us minus two weeks.
Nervous? Yes. Resigned to a reinstated lock-down? Probably.
Minus 2 weeks? No, you are way more than that out in front.
The re-imposition of stage 4 restrictions in the Melbourne metro area, including a curfew in from 8pm to 5am and travel restrictions limited to within 5km from home.
Methinks this might soundly roger Melbourne’s ambitions to regain it’s “World’s Most Liveable City” title.
Maybe you just managed to stomp on the early embers when you saw what happened to us? Here’s hoping!
As for the title … next year. We can be patient. We’re getting pleeeenty of practise!
We have dodged more than our share of bullets and had more than our share of luck so far.
It’s not to bad in Sydney but I have my extended family living along both sides of the Murray where it gets a logistically messy.
… And now, I’m betting that Australia has been beaten, in the same way as India and the USA. My opinion at the moment is that the ‘delta’ strain is here to stay, and will not be eradicated.