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I don't come here often but just want to pop in to say hope everyone is well, safe and dealing with the lockdowns. I for one am just happy the supermarkets have gone back to normal, and have a bit more time digging into my small little TF collection to enjoy them! :)
While some States & Territories are easing lockdown restrictions, Victoria won’t be making any announcement til 11 May.
Don’t know about you lot but I’m spending a lot more money working from home than going to work.
Our numbers are still pretty good in the last week, with most new cases being from people still returning to Australia and from within existing clusters.
I think our politicians could be stepping up their messages of optimism, and that restrictions may only be weeks now instead of months, considering several states have been showing zero new cases for much of the last week. With a couple of weeks of this for all but NSW and VIC, it should mean the virus is virtually non-existent in those other states.
Waiting until the virus was significantly contained or even eradicated, is certainly the option we were going for in Australia, and even I'm surprised at how well it has been achieved here. And fortunately we had our major politicians putting aside their party differences and not actively undermining each other's efforts... unlike in some other countries that are seeing some politicians encouraging people to protest the lockdowns for their own personal political and/or financial benefit.
In a country like America, the virus didn't suddenly appear in every state.... it arrived in just a few coastal states first that have international airports, and is slowly making its way into the central states. Since those central states were getting hit later, some of them (and their people) didn't see the need for a nation-wide lockdown, assuming that the virus was not a big deal because it was some other state's problem. It was then claimed by people in those states that it was all just an over-reaction, and that they were being punished economically... but obviously, if they had pre-emptively locked down their states before the virus hit, they wouldn't now be some of the hardest hit states in the next few weeks. The US have passed 66,000 deaths now, and early projections after lockdown measures were in place over there, was that they shouldn't go above 100,000 deaths in America. With New York being a good example of how to effectively respond to the virus, it was looking like they wouldn't get anywhere near 100,000, but with only about 10 states past their peak deathrate, and about 30 states lifting restrictions this week, I think they are going to smash that number before the end of May.
If a country's government did nothing and 10% of the population died from a preventable death, people would protest... but if a country's government pre-emptively locks down society before it spreads, or has lockdown measures to reduce the death rate significantly, people will never know how bad it could have been and will protest the restrictions.
It's certainly not a good time to be a politician, because you're damned if you do and you're damned if you don't.
Both options are going to cost billions of dollars to the economy, because each preventable sick person is an extra expense to the economy (both in medical costs and production costs if they are off work for a few weeks), and each death also has a dollar cost to the economy, particularly if that person is a worker and their job needs to be re-filled and re-trained (especially vital occupations like emergency services).
However, if you take the humane option of saving lives by shutting down society for a couple of months, less intelligent people won't know the amount of lives and dollars saved by preventing the virus from infecting a larger number of people. Even if it "only" killed 10% of the population by doing nothing, just to "protect the economy", most industries and occupations would collapse from under-staffing, costing the economy billions more. Just look at the food supply chain in America - potentially facing shortages of processed foods because too many people in those industries are getting sick and dying. That's millions of dollars lost in spoiled food, and millions of tax dollars spent on alternatives and feeding those out of work or too sick to work.
So for anyone narrow-minded enough who says that it is costing the economy keeping it closed during any virus that has the potential of killing 10% or more of the population WITHOUT restrictions (like this one), tell them to open their eyes to the actual cost to the economy if that number of people and workers are allowed to get sick or die.
Annoys me that more people are looking at the dollars over people's lives. Sure the economy is gonna tank, but someone's life should matter more.
Sadly, to many it doesn't. Especially in the USA, the land of rampant individualism.Quote:
Originally Posted by 1AZRAEL1
Watching some of the various news programs on SBS from other countries is interesting, particularly the non-western news programs that give us details of what the virus is like in all those other non-western countries that our media don't cover. Russia is being swamped with infections still increasing by large numbers, as are some South American countries and Afghanistan. I think Africa could still be a ticking timebomb, as the virus is taking a while to get into a lot of places since international travel has dried up, but it seems that it was international aid workers who have brought in the virus to places like Sudan, that don't have the resources to deal with this virus. On the other hand, countries like Nigeria that have been dealing with things like ebola, could see minimal cases of covid-19, as they have had a number of years of training their people to prevent the spread of infections.
If quite a few countries in Europe, the middle east and Australasia were able to take measures to result in them now being several weeks past their peak infections/deaths, it boggles the mind that a 1st-world country like America is still having 10,000 or more dying each week, with no sign of the rate slowing.
At least half of the US states are still only in the early stages of the virus hitting them, so America is yet to see the worst of this virus, and not just in terms of deaths, but to their economy. The hotspots in places like New York may have had the big number of deaths, but as the "foodbowl" and "manufacturing" states start getting hit by higher infection rates in the next few weeks, their whole country will suffer, as more processing businesses are forced to shut down by choice in states that are re-opened.
And the worse thing for people in those states is that if their state is officially re-opened, people won't be eligible for welfare payments if they refuse to work, even at a business that has had infected people (like over 20 meat processing plants that have become over-whelmed by infected people, having to close down, but being instructed by the president to go back to work). And it will be the lowest paid people who are in jobs most likely to be contaminated by the virus, as blue collar workers and service workers can't do their jobs from the safety of their homes.
I watched the film "Contagion" when it was on TV the other week, and it was from 2011, but it predicted a lot of things that the world is going through right now... and it also showed us how too much of the truth to the public will cause panic and chaos... particularly when there are conspiracy theorists getting in the ears of the less educated.
Just referring to something I had speculated for Australia 6 weeks ago (the virus infecting people in vital industries, causing them to shut down), which fortunately didn't end up happening here, but with central US states rushing to get people back to work, and some food factories already impacted, I think that a breakdown of food chains is more likely to occur over there now. It just makes no sense, for states to see how bad it can from the states that were first affected, to not take similar measures before the outbreak hits them.
This is certainly one time I'm glad I live here and not over there. I'm just going to miss travelling to other countries for toys and conventions for a while.Quote:
With this virus being around for at least 9 months until a vaccine is available (at best), politicians would be foolish to guarantee that the grocery store supply chain (from farms, to wholesalers, to grocery warehouses, to transport, to supermarkets) won't be severed for weeks at a time, if just one person at a worksite or shift is infected. .... any worksite that has over 100 people (like a grocery warehouse), statistically, one of those people will be infected within the next two weeks, shutting down one of three shifts or the entire site for two weeks. Then over the next 9 months as more people get the infection, the site shuts down again, dozens of times until there is a vaccine to keep the place open.
I'm reminded how lucky I am to get to Germany and back on February. Some of the members of the bands I caught in Berlin I think had to cut short their tour before it finished, and when a they got back some got sick and at least one ended up in ICU.
What is the Australian side of the talk about the shared AU/NZ bubble?
Personally you couldn't pay me to get on a plane this year and travel anywhere.
After looking at the sightings thread and seeing sightings .. are Australians able to walk into stores?
Over here in New Zealand, retail stores can only offer contactless delivery - ie, purchase from a website and they will put it into the postal system (some smaller stores allow you to call the store and go to the store to physically pick up something that has been ordered, but you aren't allowed to set foot in the store)
Depends on what kind of store it is, how big it is, and where you are. There are limits to how many people can be in a given store at once, and a lot of shops/businesses that are 'non-essential' are closed, but things like KMart etc are still open to the public, and at least some restaurants are letting people pick up takeaway orders in-store.Quote:
Originally Posted by Zippo
AFAIK the restrictions are mostly on a State or regional basis, e.g. I live in North-west Tasmania these days and we've just come out of three weeks of Stage 4 lockdown, so more stores were closed or else not open to the general public. You could still go into supermarkets etc. though.