The most notable thing about the Wuhan plague is that nearly every one of the devastating outbreaks which have fuelled so much unwonted hysteria can be traced back to official incompetence. From the initial outbreak in Wuhan to the disaster in New York, the essential uselessness of politicians, bureaucrats and “experts” has been brutally exposed.
Nowhere so much, perhaps, as in Victoria. To damn them with faint praise, the Andrews government tried to do most of the right things: quarantine incoming travellers, test widely and isolate clusters. The only problem was that it royally stuffed up everything. From the disastrous decision to put untrained, diversity-hire private security guards in charge of quarantine hotels to a testing regime which could generously be described as hopeless, to the consequent, panicked draconian lockdown, those in charge in Victoria failed at every turn. No-one has been held accountable.
And they’re doing it all over, again.
Barely 40 active COVID cases, and the wheels are already falling off the Andrews Labor government’s response: details of exposure sites consistently wrong; massive queues for people to get tested; Victorians locked out of their own state; and Australians from other states locked in hotel quarantine without warning or cause, and in some cases under false pretences.
We had been reassured by Daniel Andrews that all lessons had been learned from the largely useless Coate inquiry into the hotel quarantine fiasco, and the parliamentary inquiry into the contact-tracing failures[…]
Don’t forget that the hotel quarantine errors caused 99 per cent of the 20,000 cases in the second wave between June and October, resulting in 801 deaths.
Andrews not only shamefully dodged responsibility for the deadly mess, it is becoming painfully obvious that neither he nor anyone else in Victoria’s bureaucracy have learned a damned thing.
Andrews boasted Victoria now has “a much-improved contact-tracing system, I think the best in class when it comes to IT, an end-to-end IT solution”. This was despite the parliamentary inquiry finding that “however capable the current contact-tracing solution is, it was not available when the Victorian public needed it. This failure cost lives and was unable to be rectified without strict lockdown measures.”
But our tracking, tracing and testing regime is still a terrible circus, with the long-awaited return of public servants to the CBD having been delayed by a further week, putting more pressure on CBD small businesses that have been doing it so tough for so long.
The litany of failure of Victoria’s contact tracing program would be comical, if it weren’t so potentially disastrous. Shops and wineries that don’t even exist have been named as exposure sites. Each time, the “much-improved” system got basic details wrong. At a press conference, Andrews’ stand-in, the ominously-named Jeroen Weimar, specifically named the “Wonga Estate” winery in Strathbogie. The actual site was the Wyanga winery in Lakes Entrance, five hours’ from Strathbogie.
Other exposure sites were notified only by the media: the government simply didn’t bother – and it got the exposure dates wrong, anyway.
Facts matter. That error meant those who were potentially exposed on December 28 didn’t isolate and attended social gatherings on New Year’s Eve.
The Australian
The stuff-ups just keep piling on. A COVID test takes a few minutes, yet Victorians have had to queue for hours. Sometimes, only to be turned away before the testing site even opened.
The panicked rush to slam borders shut is an even bigger shemozzle. On New Year’s Eve, the Victorian government gave its residents holidaying interstate just 24 hours to return. Those in Queensland were told by the Victorian government to drive through NSW without stopping for even a break. Thousands who didn’t make it have been stranded in NSW for at least a month.
And yet, against all evidence and reason, Victorians continue to moronically chant that they “StandWithDan”.
At some point, you have to conclude that these people deserve all they get.
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