Quote Originally Posted by Paulbot View Post
I remember I almost didn't go to the meetup with the Australian Toy Fair because hayfever gave me a runny nose and we were starting to become a little wary. Who knew it was going to escalate the way it did
Indeed... and with me (selfishly) hoping that the reborn BotCon in 2021 is worth attending, I am constantly keeping an eye on the stats and updates in America as well as Australia. Because America won't re-open while the virus is still around (or the Australian Government won't allow people travelling to infected countries)... so a trip to a convention in America will only happen when there is a vaccine or cure (could be 1-2 years away), or the virus disappears completely from lockdown measures, which now seems to be possible if we don't rush the wind-back of our lockdown restrictions (as we are seeing in countries that don't have cooperation between different levels of government).

But saying that, our stats are amazing compared to the rest of the world, as most of our states have had zero or single digits of daily new cases for the last week, and that's with over 10,000 tests done every day. If we keep going at this rate, and we don't have any more arrivals bringing in the virus (there's still quite a few Australians yet to get back), I don't see why we wouldn't be back to normal before the end of May - we would then only have to financially support the tourism industry until we can let visitors back in. I think it's amazing to see our different state and federal politicians put aside their political differences to unite against this problem, so that we don't have any senior politicians encouraging their supporters to reject or resist the restrictions (that are there for their own good). It has certainly been a significant factor in America, who had virus cases a week before Australia, and yet their daily numbers are still increasing, a whole month after we hit our peak day at the end of March. It certainly doesn't make it easy to coordinate a scientific national approach when you have a misguided and uneducated president asking one of the doctors at the daily live press briefing, if they can look into injecting disinfectant into people to kill the virus... while also encouraging people to protest the preventative restrictions, sabotaging efforts to fight a virus that will keep spreading over there until a vaccine exists.

At least if we end up having most of our industries free to fully re-open without a resurgence of the virus that we've seen in other countries that re-opened too early, it will once again make us the envy of the other developed economies (we were the only one to not have a recession after the GFC in 2008)... which should help our dollar, to make our toys and imported toys cheaper.