Blog Day 323 - Saturday 13 February 2021

Dull and grey here today, and then there is the weather........

I daresay that all of my regular readers would be aware that at 11.59pm last night the entire state went into a pretty severe 5 day lockdown.

I was supposed to visit some friends of mine today and Sunday, two families that have just bought new houses that I would obviously like to visit and see the new places.  They are both outside my five kilometre range and can't entertain visitors anyway.  So next week maybe.

I was supposed to be doing two school tours that the Shrine on Tuesday, obviously that aint happening.

I went for my walk at 11.30am this morning along the usually bustling Saturday morning Bentleigh East streets, the photos below show you what a lockdown does to the local traders.

Hotel Car Park (no one playing the pokies)

Centre Rd East Bentleigh

Centre Rd East Bentleigh

Lets hope that it is only five days.

On a lighter note I have some tips for today's races at Flemington - Race 6 Number 6 and Race 7 Number 11.  If number 11 gets up I will be a very wealthy man.

Obviously the weak point in our anti virus strategy is the return of overseas travellers and allowing others to enter the country such as the tennis players and officials.  I have been giving this some thought and there are a couple of options to tighten up on this.

Option  one is to just ban all international passenger flights into Australia, this would break the back of the virus within weeks, if not days.  This would take advantage of our geographical blessing of being an island.  However, I don't think that this option is politically viable.  Under this plan international freight flights would be allowed under very strict conditions for the flight crews.  As in they would not be allowed to leave "airside" of the airport.

The second option is to manage the incoming international flights with far stronger command and control.

• First all returning international travellers (RITs) would be accommodated in dedicated accommodation facilities - eg Howard Spring NT and/or Christmas island, not hotels in the CBD.

• Federal government to have control of these facilities - AFP, Border Force and ADF to manage on a day to day basis.

• After 14 - 21 days in quarantine with regular testing the RITs would be flown to their original destination. All direct costs of accommodation and travel to be paid by the RITs.

• To control the numbers of RITs and ensure the process is safe and manageable a priority system for managing the number of RITs would be put in place.  Below is my suggested list for prioritising the RITs.  (Remember we are constantly being told that there are 40,000 people trying to get into the country at the moment.  It doesn't seem to matter how many RITs come into the country the figure never goes down).

• Priority schedule for RITs;

1. Essential medical and health professionals
2. Urgent and provable compassionate cases, including medical issues for Australian citizens.
3. Genuine overseas travellers, Australian citizens, stranded with no resources and limited or nil financial resources.
4. Australian citizens who were working/living overseas for less than 12 months who no longer have employment.
5. Australian citizens who were working/living overseas for more than 12 months who no longer have employment or capacity to support themselves and their families.
6. All other Australian citizens who wish to return to Australia.
7. Dual nationality citizens where they hold Australian citizenship and one other where they have no family or support mechanisms in their current country of residence (not being their country of dual citizenship).
8. Dual nationality citizens where they hold Australian citizenship and one other where they are currently living, have no family or support mechanisms in their country of dual citizenship or have been there for less than 12 months.
9. Dual nationality citizens who have lived in the country of their dual citizenship for more than 12 months.
10. All others - except any sportspeople, actors, politicians, business people who don't match the above criteria.

• The above criteria would be applied to allow a daily quota of travellers to enter the country subject to the capacity of the designated facilities.

The above may not be perfect but I reckon it is pretty close.  I might offer my services to whatever level of government wants to hire me as a consultant trouble-shooter.

Last night we had the ridiculous situation where a tennis game had to be stopped for 10 minutes at 11.30pm to allow the spectators the leave the venue so that they could be home by 11.59pm when the lockdown kicked in.  

By the way the tennis is allowed to continue, albeit without spectators, as the players etc are considered essential workers.  Can this get even more farcical ?

Given I have already had a bit to say today I won't go into too much detail on the numbers, I will do a full run through of the numbers tomorrow.  Suffice to say that Victoria recorded one new community transmission who is a close friend of one of the Holiday Inn staff members.  So far so good, the virus still has not broken out into the general community.

No great changes in the worldwide figures although the US appears to be challenging its downward trend in both new infections and deaths.  

Israel has vaccinated 72% of its population, UK 21% and US 14%.  How many has Australia done?  Oh, that's right, none!