The streets of Melbourne are empty and the only sound to be heard is the hysterical weeping of a million parents as they realise that they have to spend even more time with their children. The weeping of the children would be louder but they slid into catatonia some time ago. Melbourne is under curfew, grim faced military personnel are knocking on doors to make sure the disease ridden are staying at home and my plague correspondent's husband can no longer ride his unicycle to the shops.
To be fair its a sort of off/on curfew. You're allowed out during the daylight as long as you have a legitimate reason. Legitimate reasons include shopping, exercise and sex. At night everybody is locked down and you just have to have sex with whoever is available in your own home. It would seem that the coronavirus only travels at night.
Nursing homes are still the epicentre of the latest outbreak with the elderly dead being carried out in droves. Given that nursing homes are essentially storage facilities for the feeble and failing and are run by people whose principal interest is making a profit out of the entire enterprise I'm a little surprised there were any living people in the places before the virus struck. Politicians (largely those in opposition) have made dark mutterings about investigations into some of these homes. Those politicians in power have been trying to soft pedal a bit for a very simple reason. The more private nursing homes there are the less the government has to support the elderly and the near dead. If it is revealed that our private nursing homes are ill run hell holes some of them might be driven out of business (or at least forced to rebrand) which would immediately place pressure on the government to pick up the slack. Therefore the government is desperately trying not to discover that private nursing homes are ill run hell holes.
In my slightly less infected neck of the woods we appear to be teetering on the edge of disaster without (so far) quite tipping over. New cases are in the low teens daily as opposed to Victoria where they're in the middle hundreds. Adding credence to the "coronavirus only travels at night" theory most of the new cases seem to be connected with people on pub crawls. Personally I don't see why you can't do a pub crawl during the day but there are still some people who think that 10am is a little early to be starting on your third vodka and tonic. Among those people is my stuffed puffin who has taken to hiding all the alcohol in my flat in the hopes that I might still be sober at midday. Frankly I think that's a bad idea, if he ever gets to encounter my real personality he's going to be sorely disappointed and possibly deeply terrified.
Still there is some amusement to be gained. There is a court case going on over in Western Australia challenging the legality of their border closure. This case was brought by a, well let's call him a businessman since a phrase like "bloated criminal" might be misinterpreted, who was greatly wrath that border closures actually applied to him as well. At the time the Federal government eagerly joined in this case since it was annoyed that Western Australia had implemented these measures when it was hoping to get through this without having to go too far. Since then Victoria has exploded, every state is locking off every other state and the government has realised that supporting a morally dubious blow hard isn't exactly a public relations success story. The government is belatedly trying to extricate itself from the entire mess and is now backpedalling so fast its falling over itself coming forward.
Desperate for some good news I contacted this blog's silver linings reporter to see if she could provide a ray of sunlight in the gathering gloom. It has to be said she came up trumps.
"Tasmania's economy is now the strongest in Australia," she announced in tones of mingled smugness and astonishment.
"Say that again?"
She repeated herself and I got her to go through it one more time just to make sure I was hearing her correctly. There are two principal reasons for Tasmania's near miraculous elevation to the top of Australia's economic heap. Firstly when the bulk of your economy relies on welfare payments the collapse of the overall economy isn't going to have as much effect on you as it might in an area that used to have jobs. The second reason is the quarantine. Tasmania still isn't letting anyone from outside into the state and furthermore most of the other states have similar strictures in place. Up until this time the first thing any Tasmanian who acquired some money did was leave Tasmania. Now more or less imprisoned on their little isle they are, with varying degrees of reluctance, holidaying locally and pumping some money into their state's economy. As long as the mainland mortality rates remain high Tasmania will continue to experience a boomtime.
I congratulated my correspondent on her state's unexpected achievement but she didn't seem as pleased with it as I thought she might. On closer interrogation it turns out with all of the Tasmanians holidaying at home it was getting increasingly difficult for her to book space at camping grounds. There was a very real danger that her children might have to spend much of the Spring and Summer months under a solid roof rather than a tent. In the background I could hear her children celebrating immoderately.
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