Plague Update #30 - Here We Go Again

I sit cringing in my icy home, I could have heating but my puffin doesn't like it, waiting for death (or mild respiratory issues) to strike me down.  Yes all of the triumphalist mocking of Victoria in my previous blog entry is coming back to haunt me as it turns out that going to a packed pub isn't the best way of social distancing.  One night's piss-up at a pub that nobody had ever heard of before and suddenly New South Wales is back on the COVID radar.

States that were just about to allow denizens of NSW across their borders are starting to backpedal as we attempt to corral everybody who has ever walked past that pub and lock them up in a barbed wire enclosure.  Still things are mild compared with Victoria where they are learning the folly of using night club bouncers as emergency first responders.  Still its not all bad news (unless you live in Melbourne).  We seem to have rounded up the diseased pub goers and the source of the infection (a traveler from Victoria) has been identified and pilloried.

Of course it is grotesquely unfair and beneath our dignity to demonise our southern neighbours simply because they are travel happy plague rats spreading disease wherever they go.  Outrageously the Queensland government is refusing access to citizens of NSW who hail from the hotspots identified in the latest outbreak.  Apparently they consider us travel happy plague rats spreading disease wherever we go.  Can I just say that that sort of language is unhelpful and deeply inappropriate and better directed at Victorians.

As you can see the cracks are starting to appear in our happy little Commonwealth.  One of the things that will save us is the fact that we didn't particularly like each other anyway.  It is unlikely that the spread of coronavirus will make relations between the various states much worse than they usually are anyway.  Of course there will be the occasional bit of friendly kidding; one of our state government ministers offered to hold the Melbourne Cup in Sydney if Melbourne was still under lockdown.  The Victorian premier responded with a two word answer.

For those citizens in quarantine time is obviously dragging heavily.  Police in the ACT have issued an appeal to those answering the door when police check on them to put some clothes on first.  Either these people really like the police or two weeks isolation brings out deeply buried facets of ones personality that rarely see the light of day. Given the time of year I wouldn't have thought inhabitants of the ACT would ever want to be naked.  I've been in Canberra in Winter and the only danger police would be in if they knocked on my door is the likelihood that I would skin them to provide myself with an extra blanket.

Five healthcare workers in Melbourne have testing positive for COVID in an outbreak linked to a sushi outlet.  They might want to test again.  It's entirely possible they just have salmonella.  More concerning (not for me but for the inmates and their relatives) is the fact that clusters have been popping up at aged care facilities.  Talk about gathering the low hanging fruit, coronavirus.  Come on, you're better than that.  I tried speaking with one of my embedded reporters about the issues but she hasn't left the house in a week and neither have her children, the last time I saw her she was embedding kitchen knives into her limbs.