Andrew Bolt: Our governments have failed to protect our vulnerable from coronavirus
What Victorians really need in time like this is for governments to do the basics well. Yet whether it be the Andrews Government hiring amateurs to run hotel quarantine or the Morrison Government failing to develop a virus plan for aged care, they’ve failed us, writes Andrew Bolt.
Andrew Bolt
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Victoria – even after 410 new infections on Wednesday and 21 more deaths – proves there is no need to panic about this coronavirus.
There’s no need to impose obscenely tough lockdowns that have caused big rises in suicides and domestic violence, and thrown more than 300,000 Victorians out of work.
No need for the fake toughness of a pointless curfew, a ban on gardeners who’d infect nobody if they mowed your lawn, or an order to wear masks even in the open air, where risks of transmission are near zero.
What Victoria’s scandals show is we really need governments to just damn well do the basics. And do them well.
Each time I say this, critics claim I am wise after the event. Now I even get idiotic sniping from the Prime Minister, complaining such views as mine as “hideous”, and it is “immoral” to allegedly say “our elderly should have in some way have been offered up in relation to this virus”.
Scott Morrison, I’ve said no such thing. Again and again, I’ve said the opposite: protect the elderly. Close off the aged-care homes. Create a super meals-on-wheels so older Australians can stay safely at home.
Just do the basics. Do them properly and you won’t need to smash the economy with bans that claim our young — through despair and suicide — to save the very aged and the dying.
But what have you and Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews done instead?
You failed to do precisely what was obvious and critical from the start.
They were so obvious, that even I was shouting it out as far back as March 28. No, not just wise after the event.
“Our new approach must instead be to quarantine all people coming in from overseas,” I said.
“It must be to aggressively track down everyone who is or even might be infected and force them into isolation and check their whereabouts a least a couple of times a day,” I added.
“And the government must also really step up protection for everyone over 65.”
And days later: “Why have we locked up the nation, not locked down the nursing homes?”
But let me tell you what happened instead in Victoria.
On quarantining returning travellers, the government failed.
This second wave of infections actually escaped from Victoria’s quarantine hotels.
Those hotels should have been locked down tight by professionals, like the police, prison guards or the Australian Defence Force.
Instead, Premier Andrews — for reasons he won’t explain — gave that critical job to private security guards, poorly trained, poorly equipped, and the guards themselves spread the virus outside.
On tracing and isolating the sick and potentially infectious, another fail.
Victoria’s virus tests take lethally long to give people results — one to three days, and often longer. Tests overseas can give results in 10 minutes. What aren’t they used here?
Then there’s the tracing. A childcare operator tells me he warned the Health Department on Sunday two weeks ago that one of his staff and her two children at the centre had the virus.
It took the department six days to send close contacts of the woman and children a warning to get tested.
And look at how weak we’ve been in making sure the sick stay in quarantine.
I don’t say we should be as hard-line as China, which welded some people into their homes.
But we could have been like Taiwan, phoning everyone in quarantine daily to make sure they were with their phone, and tracking that phone to make sure the sick did not step outside.
Instead, the sick in Victoria were rarely checked and even allowed outside for exercise. By the time checks were stepped up, one in four of the sick were not at home.
Finally, in protecting the old, another fail.
Commonwealth figures show nearly 80 per cent of Victoria’s dead died in aged care homes, which are supervised by the Morrison government.
These people were sitting ducks for the virus, yet counsel assisting the royal commission into aged care this week said the Morrison government failed to develop a virus plan for those homes, even after the virus ripped through Sydney’s Newmarch House and Dorothy Henderson Lodge.
On Wednesday, another 16 Victorians in aged care were reported to have died. And now the virus has infected around 100 people in disabled care.
Our governments failed in the most basic tasks.
Fix that, tell people to social distance, and no other state need be smashed as poor Victoria is being smashed by bans right now.