Blog Day 417 - Wednesday 19 May 2021

 With only four new infections reported in Australia in the last 24 hours and all of those are ROTs, things are going along OK in this country at the moment.  Although, let us not forget that the border lockdowns are still causing lots of problems in lots of industries, such as; universities, language colleges and other educational institutions that rely on overseas students for a large part of their income; hospitality and tourism businesses; travel - airlines in particular, the companies that service the airlines, but also hire car & limousine companies.

Although the businesses in the suburbs are battling along OK the CBD has not recovered.  Many office workers in the city are still working from home or dividing their time between home and their city office.  Also there are not the tourists in the CBD who would usually be looking for a place to have a coffee or a drink or a meal.

I haven't been into the CBD for a few weeks but I hear that is is looking grubby and a lot of the cafes and restaurants that closed haven't reopened.

From first hand experience at the Shrine not only are international tourists non existent it is apparent that interstate traveller numbers are well down on the usual numbers.  I think that people are still nervous about travelling interstate.  We are seeing reasonable numbers of local and country folk visiting the Shrine which is good to see and we are seeing lots of school groups coming through from both local and regional schools.

In case you didn't know this week is Volunteer Week so if you know any volunteers be kind to them. Free lunch at the Shrine this week for the volunteers, as I have said before if you get between a volunteer and a free party pie you are likely to lose a limb.

As stated above, only 4 new cases reported in Australia in the last 24 hours and no new local infections.  That leaves us with 122 active cases Australia wide and 119 of these are ROTs.  Of the active cases 25 of them are in hospital and 3 of them are in ICU.

We are now getting some numbers for 1st and 2nd vaccinations in Australia.  Currently it is reported that 3,200,417 vaccine doses have been administered Australia wide.  Of these 2,138,970 are the 1st dose and 318,863 are the 2nd doses.  Now I know that the 1st and 2nd dose figures do not add up the total, but I only report them and I am not responsible for the content, although you wouldn't think that it would be that hard to get it right.

Talking about dodgy figures the world wide figures are not making a lot of sense.

India's new infections are down dramatically at 281,000 for the last 24 hours reported; the US figures are up at 54,000 new infections; Brazil's new daily infections are down to 30,000 from 85,000 three days ago, but Brazil's figures are always low  and unreliable on a Wednesday; France's figures are a nonsense again; Turkey seems to have things under control, likewise the UK.  Worldwide the new infection figures are solidly down but how much of this is due to shoddy reporting I don't know.  As usual we will need to see how the figures pan out over the next few days.



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