It took until Friday for the Victorian border to be properly closed.
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Meanwhile, we have a Wagga family with the virus, a case of a COVID-positive person visiting shops, and the case of a Wagga character being arrested at the border in Corowa. Why hasn't NSW Health Minister Brad Hazzard been sacked?
Just a few weeks ago, Australians were generally quite proud of the way we had handled COVID-19.
We had shown ourselves to be a disciplined community ready to sacrifice freedoms and economic security to preserve the lives of Australian citizens.
The Sydney Morning Herald on July 10 reported that: "Australia has one of the lowest case fatality rates in the world for COVID-19", but even then Victoria was threatening to upset our success.
Our high testing rate was ensuring that hospitals were not overwhelmed. We looked at the chaos in America, Britain, Brazil, and indeed Sweden where their death rate of 564 per million is worse than America.
In the USA, their hospital system was overwhelmed. In New York, once hospitals were overcrowded with COVID cases, patients were moved to aged care facilities, spreading the disease to the most-vulnerable COVID group in the community!
So did our lockdowns work? At first, I supported those who said that the common cold and flu kill more people than coronavirus will ever do. I was ready to mock the economic devastation that the New Zealand government forced on its people.
Now, with hindsight, I believe we did the right thing, but should have closed airports a week or two earlier. We should have immediately banned flights into Australia, particularly from China. It took too long to introduce health screening at airports, and compulsory quarantine.
The Ruby Princess has shown us that the quick no-fuss way of unloading Australian cruise passengers has to change, forever! No-one who goes cruising is going to like that.
Why did Victoria fail when every other state had COVID under control?
Scott Morrison has shown calm leadership at a national level. State premiers likewise have taken appropriate steps to care for their citizens.
Why did Victoria fail when every other state had COVID under control?
First, it was the Black Lives Matter parades which luckily had few, if any, COVID cases in other states. But Victoria's march was the biggest, with an estimated 30,000 closely packed marchers.
There were early cases in Victoria from the BLM march, but it suited Premier Dan Andrews to quickly shift the focus onto others. It also happened to get Labor's branch stacking story off the front pages.
Then outbreaks were blamed on refugee groups and their lack of English. Maybe they hadn't received the COVID warnings? Maybe they didn't understand that "large gatherings" also meant their own family? And so on.
The Socialist Alliance, usually part of Andrews' cheer squad, screamed, "The Victorian lockdown of public housing estates was scapegoating and victimisation of migrants and poor working-class people. It revealed the government's racist and patronising assumption that these people are incapable of understanding, or complying with, public health messages voluntarily."
But weren't many positive cases found in these towers? And didn't Victoria's hotel quarantine failures become public when it was admitted that some returning travellers came from ethnic groups that refused COVID tests before their release?
How could health screening not be compulsory?
You can't refuse a breath or drug test if stopped at an RBT station.
You can't refuse a full body scan at an airport. So why excuse returning overseas travellers from being tested at the end of their 14 day hotel quarantine?
Victoria had refused the offer of army personnel to guarantee hotel quarantine security.
Security guards who belonged to a union were favoured. The guards-sleeping-with-quarantined-travellers scandal followed!
Blaming the federal government for aged care deaths is contemptible. NSW has been on top of the problem since Newmarch House.
Other states are not experiencing aged care deaths. Other states don't have 700 plus daily COVID cases.
The Victorian COVID genome has spread to NSW, Queensland - and Wagga.
This Victorian government bungle is costing the nation billions.