If there’s one thing that’s characterised the Wuhan plague, it’s the astonishing incompetence of so many governments and bureaucracies. Despite their conceit that it’s their place to run our lives to the level of ruling just how many people we’re allowed to have at weddings and funerals, or just how far we’re allowed to venture from our home prisons, elected and unelected officials alike have regularly stuffed up on a catastrophic scale.
In Victoria, the state’s dictatorial lockdown was entirely as a result of its botched hotel quarantine program. South Australians have been plunged into a lockdown so draconian that they weren’t even allowed out to exercise or walk their dogs.
Once again, the culprit was a stuffed-up hotel quarantine. More particularly, a security guard whose lies were only uncovered by chance.
Let’s stop and marvel at the impact this bloke has had on South Australia over the past three days.
Weddings and funerals cancelled. Elective surgery banned. The entire Schoolies celebration scrapped. Every pub and restaurant shut, their dumpsters heaving with spoiled perishables. Almost every business closed, students barred from attending school and university, supermarkets pillaged, bottle shops cleaned out.
Vast traffic jams as unnerved residents queued for as long as 10 hours to have swabs jammed up their snouts at hastily expanded COVID centres across the suburbs. More than 4,000 South Aussies forced into quarantine.
Millions and millions of dollars ripped from the economy.
All because this bloke lied about the fact that he was secretly working at a pizza bar – while also working as a security guard at a medi-hotel – claiming he was merely a customer and creating a baseless but understandable fear that he may have contracted the virus from a pizza box.
While of course the blame ultimately comes home to the guard who lied, it also raises questions about the competence and thoroughness of the hotel quarantine procedure. In Melbourne, a major vector in the outbreak was improperly trained or supervised security guards popping into a nearby KFC for lunch.
Does it strike anyone else as grossly negligent that those working in close contact with quarantinees are not more thoroughly vetted and monitored?
Does anyone else think that having guards working quarantine and then clocking off to mingle in the community is a disaster waiting to happen?
So, the unnamed – undoubtedly for his safety – guard and the pizza bar, which is probably the least popular business in South Australia since the Snowtown bank, will cop a tsunami of blame. Rightly so.
And the harder questions for politicians and bureacrats will go unasked and unanswered.