Rita Panahi: Daniel Andrews delivers a roadmap to misery
The slavish adherence to health advice that is never released and modelling that has been wildly wrong sees Australia isolated and trapped in a Covid hellscape of its own making.
Rita Panahi
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After being shamed into releasing a roadmap the Dan Andrews government has delivered a document of misery and malpractice.
Not so much a roadmap to freedom but a plan to inflict further crippling restrictions even once we reach 80 per cent double vaccinated.
Lockdown Six, sold as a seven-day short, sharp lockdown will in fact last more than 80 days.
At Monday’s press conference the premier was again blaming vaccine supply and the virus being imported from Sydney for Victoria’s woes.
Nobody with an IQ above room temperature accepts that self-serving nonsense and I don’t recall the NSW premier Gladys Berejiklian blaming Victoria for the Covid outbreaks we exported.
NSW’s plan is imperfect and overly cautious, particularly when it comes to schools, but their citizens will be living relatively freely when the 70 per cent double jabbed target is met while Victorians will still be under sweeping restrictions.
The harm being inflicted in the name of “Covid safety” now far exceeds the benefit.
Throughout this pandemic the modelling, both here and overseas, has been wildly wrong and always wrong in the one direction.
The Burnet Institute is no different and as late as August 2021 released absurd, scaremongering predictions about Sydney’s outbreak topping 7,000 plus cases a day.
“Furthermore, unless new controls introduced on 28 and 30 July or in the future (eg. LGAs that develop large case numbers are included in the tighter controls) have a major impact, our model projects that Sydney will have about 7700 cases per day 4 weeks from now,” the Burnet Institute claimed in an August 2 report authored by a quartet of their top experts including the director and deputy director.
Well the new controls didn’t have much of an impact and yet NSW never got anywhere near the doomsday predictions.
On Monday NSW had 935 cases from 124,650 tests while Victoria reported 567 cases from just 50,915 tests.
The disparity in the daily test numbers between Victoria and NSW is not improving; one wonders what case numbers Victoria would record if the state’s testing numbers were in line with NSW.
More than 85 per cent of Victoria’s cases are concentrated in the west and northern suburbs and yet more than five million Melburnians remain under curfew with draconian restrictions that the rest of the world has long abandoned regardless of their vaccination rate.
The slavish adherence to health advice that is never released and modelling that has been consistently wrong sees Australia isolated from the rest of the world and trapped in a Covid hellscape of its own making.
We don’t need to wait for Sydney to reopen to recalibrate the modelling as premier Andrews claimed during Monday’s press conference.
The rest of the advanced world, with the exception of Australia and New Zealand, is open and they opened with vaccination rates well below Australian targets.
We can look at their figures and how their hospital systems have coped rather than rely on flawed models designed by lockdown enthusiasts.
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