Plague Update #21 - Canned Goods Revelation

Suddenly everything has been made clear.  The scales have fallen from my eyes and I feel like a fool.  Like many others I sneered at those who hoarded toilet paper at the beginning of this crisis.  I thought them knee jerk panic mongerers without a brain in their head.  New statistics show that perhaps they were farsighted strategic planners.

Retail figures have come out for the first month of the COVID lockdowns.  As you might expect right at the beginning there was a massive surge in the acquisition of toilet paper.  As the weeks went on though the toilet paper surge ended and was replaced by bulk buying of canned food instead.  What this means is that at least some of those who went on the "panic" buying of toilet paper were merely preparing themselves for their anticipated diet in the weeks to come.  You might think that you would buy food first and then toilet paper but that's the stupid way of going about it.  When you have a mountain of toilet paper by all means go out and buy canned food but you don't want to be halfway through a tinned diet when you discover that the toilet paper's run out.

While I was being forced to revise my opinion of Australia's average IQ several points upwards the general COVID news continues to be good while the specific COVID news is a little more problematic.  Victoria, which has done everything except put armoured vehicles onto the streets to enforce lockdown has had to admit that there's been a COVID spike at a meat packing plant.  Apparently fifty odd cases.  The state government hastened to announce that there was no danger to the general public, apart of course from those members of the general public who work at the packing plant in question; they're screwed.

In NSW the enquiry into who allowed the Ruby Princess (the cruise ship singlehandedly responsible for about 40% of the nation's cases) to dock and disembark passengers continues.  Health officials have been reduced to tears and representatives of various authorities have been vigorously pointing the finger at each other while attempting to persuade the enquiry that it wasn't their fault, that they didn't have the authority, that they weren't even at work that day and "look over there, a chicken!"  The answer is likely to be that at the very start of the crisis a bunch of agencies with overlapping authority and no clear directive simply tripped over each other's feet.  In happier times this is referred to as "the normal function of government."  I presume somebody will get it in the neck at the end of the enquiry, hopefully it is somebody at least notionally responsible.

Not to be outdone by the Victorian meat packing debacle NSW has had its own COVID spike at an aged care facility resulting in over a dozen deaths.  The aged care facility in question is now under severe scrutiny and has had an external advisor appointed.  Given the average age of people in these facilities such a death rate could probably be passed off as natural wastage in non plague conditions but now suddenly everybody is watching them and they're going to have to take extraordinary steps to keep their inmates alive.  Not a particularly onerous task you might think but such homes are traditionally where our aged crawl away to die.

Amusingly it turns out that the same private medical company that attended the Ruby Princess docking also provided staff (in many cases, the same staff) to the aged care facility currently sitting under a permanent shadow caused by the vultures wheeling around its roof.  The company has been paid fifty seven million dollars for its efforts so far.  How much do we have to pay to get them to stop?

Worse news from Queensland where the state premier announced that restrictions would be eased to allow five family members to gather and meet each other just in time for Mother's Day.  Mothers who thought they had a god given excuse not to see their tedious offspring this year have reacted with horror.  Up in the Northern Territory you can once again go out for a beer and a chicken parmigiana as long as you sit a long way from everybody else in the pub or restaurant.  This is fortunate as beer and chicken parmigiana are the only foodstuffs readily available in the Northern Territory unless you want to go out and shoot yourself a crocodile.  The Northern Territory has achieved this return to normality by locking down its borders and making sure the fifteen or so people from the rest of Australia who wanted to visit the territory aren't allowed to.

Meanwhile down in Tasmania my correspondents experiences with remote learning (plonking your kids in front of a monitor supposedly connected to their school and hoping for the best) are progressing in much the way you might expect.  The kids have finished all of their work by 10.30 in the morning and then promptly proceed to the kitchen (sometimes on rollerblades) to make chocolate brownies in every available receptacle.  My correspondent ran out of wine earlier in the week and one of her children has decided that she doesn't need to get out of bed to receive an education.  The smile on my correspondent's face is now so brittle that she resembles a clay pot that was left in the oven too long, rather like batch #4 of the chocolate brownies.