Blog Day 85: Tuesday 16 June 2020

Another government minister has resigned today making three in two days.  This is over the branch stacking allegations and the use of taxpayer funded staff to facilitate the branch stacking and other naughty things they shouldn't be doing.  In other words the taxpayer funded staff were being used to carry out party political activities instead of their public service roles, similar to what the government got away with in the "Red Shirts" scandal.  Give em an inch and they will take a mile!

If the opposition can't make something big of this we need a new opposition, unfortunately I am not confident that the opposition is up to it.  We shall see.

I went to Southland this morning, my first trip there in 3 months.  I bought my Coldplay CD/DVD combination album.  Listening to it now as I type.  There were signs to a mobile virus testing station in one of the car parks but I didn't see it where I parked.  The car parks looked busy but not as many people inside as I thought there would be.  Nearly all the shops were open, most with signs indicating the maximum number of people allowed in the shop, some had entry and exit lanes marked out and reminders to maintain your distance, some also had hand sanitizer at the entries and counters.  There were some empty shops and some closed shops but not as many as I thought there would be.

The blog might get a bit irregular from here on in as it looks like I might be going back to work for 2-3 days a week for a few weeks.  I will know more tomorrow after I have a meeting with my old employer (MH of JS). 

I will keep the blog going, albeit on an irregular basis, as long as it continues to entertain and amuse me.  It is also a sort of a diary of the corona virus events again for my own records.

I see that some more European countries, including France and Germany have opened up their borders for internal travel, (not that the Germans have ever worried if the borders were open or not), however they are maintaining restrictions on arrivals from overseas.

The Victorian and Australian national figures are still increasing but minimally compared to most of the rest of the world.  Victoria had 9 new cases in the previous 24 hours.  Victoria has closed 3 schools over the last couple of day due to infected students attending.  The health authorities seem pretty calm about this and say it was to be expected.  There has been no transmission of the virus at the schools and the infected students have bought the virus in with them, not caught it at the school.  The infected students go into isolation, the schools undergo a deep clean and are reopened in 24 hours or so.  

Corona Virus Daily Stats: Day 162

Vic: 1,740 (+9 from previous day) - 19 deaths (increase 0)

Aus: 7,347 (+? from previous day) - 102 deaths (increase 0)

Aus: Recovered 6,851 - current hospital 17 (+1) - current ICU 4 (+1)

World: 8,015,502 infected - 436,319 deaths (increase of 4,161 from previous day)