COVID-19: who’s going full doomsday prep on this?

Kerplunk

Likes Bikes and Dirt
Maybe because they dropped the minimum age to qualify for a vaccination?
Partly that, i saw very few in the pfizer waiting area when I was there. 90% for AZ.. But yes anecdotally, i personally don’t know any 40-49 year olds who haven’t had a shot or have one booked in.. I do know one family member but they are anti-vax everything.. Dunno how that will work out, they work in health care fronting the public, so I assume eventually it will be get the jab or get the arse..
 

dazz

Downhill Dazz
Partly that, i saw very few in the pfizer waiting area when I was there. 90% for AZ.. But yes anecdotally, i personally don’t know any 40-49 year olds who haven’t had a shot or have one booked in.. I do know one family member but they are anti-vax everything.. Dunno how that will work out, they work in health care fronting the public, so I assume eventually it will be get the jab or get the arse..
Huh, interesting! When I got my Chupa Chup last week it was the other way round, plenty in the Pfizer queues, AZ had maybe 3 people lined up? This is in the only state vax center in Ballarat (110k pop.) I guess there's a lot of people that are preferring to get it through their GP?

And FYI I'm not in the 'been sitting around' group either, became eligible for it then rang up and booked. Been asking around here at work and it seems the uptake on it is actually better than I expected from the demographic that we have in the workshop. I figured they'd be more Sky News orientated, but they are surprising me.
 

moorey

call me Mia
Huh, interesting! When I got my Chupa Chup last week it was the other way round, plenty in the Pfizer queues, AZ had maybe 3 people lined up? This is in the only state vax center in Ballarat (110k pop.) I guess there's a lot of people that are preferring to get it through their GP?

And FYI I'm not in the 'been sitting around' group either, became eligible for it then rang up and booked. Been asking around here at work and it seems the uptake on it is actually better than I expected from the demographic that we have in the workshop. I figured they'd be more Sky News orientated, but they are surprising me.
Isn't an option to get GP to do it in Ballarat. Or wasn't 2 weeks ago when I tried. Mercure was ONLY option.
 
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Dales Cannon

lightbrain about 4pm
Staff member
Some GPs up here are doing vaccinations but my GP was still working through the over 70s. Booked an appointment and went to a clinic yesterday and it was very well organised. Walk in to the main counter, check you are on the list, directed to a separate waiting area. Barely sit down and get called into the jabby area. Usual questions about life, the universe and everything then outside to an undercover area for a 15 minute vigil. Book follow up shot. Still breathing after 15 mins so on your way. Staff polite and affable. Very well done.
 

dazz

Downhill Dazz
By the ABC's reporting about half of the total jabs in Vic over recent weeks have been delivered by GP's, a lot of people commented that the VicGovDH numbers didn't add up to the total (only about half) and the explanation was that since GP's got their vax supplies from the feds, VicGovDH doesn't get the daily reporting from those, only the state run clinics. So the daily totals that get put up on twitter are only part of the picture... Man our system of government sucks.

Victoria last week, 327,538 doses of vaccine were administered through a combination of state and Commonwealth clinics
 
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moorey

call me Mia
One of my boss's here booked through hotdoc and got the jab 2 months ago?
Site appears to be working still:
View attachment 376345

Another co-worker asked his GP about it and currently has a booking also.
Must have their shit together now. I booked the day before we went into lockdown, so there probably wasn't the urgency or demand for multiple sites. All calls diverted you to a system that said you could only book at the Mercure. Didn't have the jab until the Monday. The walk in line was huuuuuge by the time I left.
 

rextheute

Likes Bikes and Dirt
I’m in tomorrow - booked via hotdoc , wander down the street into town and get jabbed .
over 50 so AZ .
Mostly so I can actually move around , Yano see my friends n family in the future .

I work with young persons and they are all very blasé, oh , that’s an old people’s thing ..........
 

Kerplunk

Likes Bikes and Dirt
I have resisted believing the line that luck played a large role in the covid outbreaks in Victoria.. But fkn seriously, what are the odds the 1 person that drives to qld has covid.. We are locked in and there is only 83 active cases out of a population of 5.2 million people.. In percentages that’s 0.000015%. Maybe it’s 0.000018% factoring in cases they don’t know about.. So this 44 year old woman manages to come into contact with one of the ~ 0.000015-18% of people that have covid then in true fk wit rule breaker fashion choses to drive to qld.. But is still enough of a rule follower to get tested...
 

PINT of Stella. mate!

Many, many Scotches
Great article and an antitode to the relentless fuckwittery of the comments section in any COVID article in The Age.

(courtesy of: Melbourne lockdown: It makes no sense to ask “why Melbourne?” (theage.com.au) )

Why Melbourne? That is the question. And everyone’s asking: exasperated Melburnians, Sydneysiders both smug and sympathetic, politicians looking to score a point. Epidemiologists have seriously attempted to provide answers, too, musing on demographics, weather, town planning, and the mobility of population. It’s a question with intuitive and emotional appeal, especially if you’re living through the grinding reality Melburnians have endured. I’ve instinctively been asking it myself.
But here’s the thing: it’s a bad question. It might even be a dangerous question. We shouldn’t be asking it.

That’s because it’s an overwhelmingly (and understandably) emotional question posing as an analytical one. In truth, though, it’s an analytically meaningless question for one very simple reason: it is trying to discover a pattern from a sample size of two. And that is an absurd thing to do.
Because however you want to dress this up, it all comes down to the current outbreak and last winter’s wave. Nothing else. The endless talk of Melbourne’s “fourth lockdown” is misleading because one of these lockdowns was national (indeed, nearly global), and another was a short circuit-breaker of the kind we’ve seen in Adelaide, Perth, and twice in Brisbane. It is not the number of lockdowns that sets Melbourne apart. It is the nature of the outbreaks. That’s what lies behind the suggestion that Melbourne cannot control outbreaks in the way other cities do.

Except that if you want to suggest this, you’d have to include in your sample the Black Rock outbreak over the new year – which many seem to have forgotten – and which Victoria contained without a lockdown in precisely the manner NSW often does. You’d also have to include the breach of Australian Open hotel quarantine in February, which Victoria handled simply by listing exposure sites. Once you do that, the idea that Melbourne is so negatively special as a matter of course becomes immediately less compelling. It retreats once more to being entirely about these two exceptional outbreaks.
That might have had the faint echo of something meaningful if these two outbreaks had lots of significant things in common. But apart from the fact they’re both in Melbourne, they have nothing in common at all. The first originated from a breach of Victoria’s hotel quarantine system, the second from South Australia’s. Victoria’s contact tracing system last year was abysmally small and under-resourced, while this time it is a vast operation that – even on the testimony of the Commonwealth’s Chief Medical Officer – is doing a first-rate job.

Put simply, the first major outbreak was almost entirely the fault of the Victorian government. The current one almost entirely isn’t. Suddenly our sample size of two isn’t even that. It’s two quite separate samples, each made up of a single event.
Indeed, the current outbreak is unique in our country’s experience so far. Its origin is a man who contracted the virus in quarantine, but tested negative all the way through. Having been cleared, he then moved about the community for six days while he was infectious, before being detected when his symptoms led him to get tested. That is a truly extraordinary situation that has nothing specifically to do with Victoria.


You could argue perhaps it should test everyone who has left hotel quarantine again, say, two or three days after they’re released. But no other state requires that. The Northern Territory just introduced it in response to this outbreak, and NSW only recommends it. Even then, if people choose to get tested, they don’t have to isolate while they await their results if they don’t have symptoms. This man would have been out and about for days anywhere in Australia.
Then it took two weeks for a second positive case to show up. That means there’s a mystery link somewhere, but this isn’t particular to Victoria, either: NSW never found the mystery source of its northern beaches outbreak. What made Victoria different was that when more cases emerged, they came with a list of the worst kind of exposure sites, including bars and clubs. That’s what made the lockdown unavoidable, and made a localised lockdown of the kind we saw in the northern beaches less viable. Unless we want to argue that people going to bars and clubs is uniquely Melburnian, this isn’t geographically meaningful, either.

The result is an outbreak with a remarkably flukey beginning, that was three weeks under way before it was identified. Now we learn a major factor in its spread is that people waited for a few symptomatic days before getting tested, and it is impossible to believe only Victorians do this. In sum, there’s little concrete reason to conclude any other jurisdiction would have detected it sooner. The basic (if popular) idea that other states have managed similar outbreaks better is false for the simple reason that no other state has faced one with these features.
Similarly, there is no good explanation for why this “keeps happening” in Melbourne, because something that has happened twice in completely incomparable ways isn’t something that “keeps happening” to begin with.


The truth is we understand what caused each outbreak very well, and they don’t permit a unified explanation. To insist on one is to chase a mirage. That might be understandable, but unfortunately this lazy Melbourne exceptionalism isn’t benign. It risks tempting every other major city into a false sense of security on the assumption that such outbreaks are simply a Melbourne thing. That is probably a major reason vaccination centres are bursting in Melbourne, but not elsewhere. Perhaps when Australia looks at Melbourne’s outbreak, it doesn’t see its own reflection. Perhaps instead of seeing a warning or a call to action, it sees something that just happens to other people. And given the obviously perilous implications of that, isn’t this a line of thinking we should resist?


Waleed Aly


Waleed Aly is co-host of Channel Ten's The Project and is a lecturer in politics at Monash University.
 
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