Déjà vu in Melbourne? Please let it not escalate.

[countessalmirena]

We don't know yet exactly what sort of lockdown it will be.

We don't know yet exactly how severe it will be, what things will be further restricted.

We don't know yet exactly how long the lockdown will be imposed.

But we know that there will be a lockdown.

I'm so disheartened by the fact that this was preventable. What possessed case number 5 (the case who contracted COVID-19 from the Wollert cluster (via a missing link, probably?) to ignore his symptoms for more than 4 days? What possessed him to go out and about while symptomatic? Was he wearing a mask? (I'll take a wild stab at it and say no, he probably wasn't.) Was he socially distancing? (Clearly not.)

Taken in conjunction with the general complacency and vaccine reluctance, the discarding of masks in public transport, the lack of enforcement (with police chiefs being - in my view - a bit ridiculous in scoffing at the task of enforcing health directives), the surging together of people  much closer than 1.5 metres when we know - surely we call know! - that this pandemic is far from over, and the number of people who are shaking hands and kissing and hugging... it's making my heart sink like a concrete boot.

I skipped wearing a mask twice recently, I admit. I had it with me, but I popped into the bank and thought it would be a good idea not to obscure my face for security reasons. I also went to a supermarket for one item, late at night just before it closed. It was not wise. Oh! And one more time... at the Melbourne Recital Centre while enjoying a fabulous concert. Every other time, yes, I've masked up. But now I feel foolish, and I won't be making any exceptions.

Stupid-decision-making people could be walking around in any part of Melbourne or indeed Victoria, refusing to be tested, brushing off their symptoms, scoffing at the notion of wearing a mask or sanitising their hands.

And more political point-scoring is being launched as well. I've no patience for it; we need to be working together to resolve these problems, and stamp out this outbreak. Ironically it is because we as a country have been doing so well that the complacent behaviour has crept back.

Fellow Melbournians and Victorians, we just have to be strong, and let's do our best to reiterate that the hygiene behaviours (    and unfortunately now (probably) as well) MUST be followed until Australia has achieved herd immunity - and even after that, we should at the very least maintain hand hygiene and cough etiquette.

Let's try to lead the world into effective long-term behaviour change.

And God help us all as we enter into whatever lockdown hell lies before us. *virtual hug* - because that's the only sort I can give you.

[eol-products]

I keep hearing its 60% more transmissible than the previous but the UK strain was also similar and that did not get out of hand the way some states said it would without a lock down. But as you say stay positive and don't read into all the hyperbole some people on TV keep coming out with.

[imastawka]

More idiots.

Anti-lockdown protestors arrested in Melbourne (msn.com)

We need a bigger deterrent.

[imastawka]

More exposure sites in Melbourne

Shopping centres on high alert after COVID-19 cases emerge (msn.com)

[not_for_sale2025]

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@eol-products wrote:

I keep hearing its 60% more transmissible than the previous but the UK strain was also similar and that did not get out of hand the way some states said it would without a lock down. But as you say stay positive and don't read into all the hyperbole some people on TV keep coming out with.

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I think sections of the media are being highly irresponsible. They focus on blame and finger pointing. instead, they should be promoting hope and encouragement by providing positive advice and guidance for the community. It seems they would rather use the virus to attack the Governments rather than help the people to remain alive and well. From what I've seen SBS, the ABC and Fox are the worst. 

[countessalmirena]

I'm not sure whether SBS, ABC and Fox are the worst, although admittedly I am weary of ABC "news" about how someone feels this or that or the other. There's too much that is perhaps not really news, and too much attention being paid to political point scoring. FOX news is not one I tend to read; I suspect that you're right in considering it an irresponsible news outlet. SBS can be good but it doesn't cover all international stories in anywhere near enough detail, and the slant can be troubling. BBC news is good to follow; I have my favourite German, Dutch, Cypriot, Spanish, Italian, etc., news outlets, and checking Reuters is usually rewarding.

Yes, the vaccine rollout has been fraught with delays, and the milestones were not reached. Well, we are in a pandemic. Contract fulfilment has been blocked; vaccine production is way behind what was hoped; some countries have bought more than they'll ever need; raw materials are hard to source; some countries are having second, third, fourth, fifth wave crises and their need has escalated; some side effects were found (only because of the huge scale of vaccination); media reported the side effects with alarmist language; vaccine hesitancy grew; and here we are now... with the demand for vaccination surging and the available doses being delivered to us in Victoria as fast as possible.

I am of the view that our government has done a very good job of minimising the damage we could have suffered in every way. There were missteps, and there were terrible life-destroying failures in Victoria in particular; however, VIC's now in a much better position with vastly improved resources.

Can you imagine how horrendous it would have been had we experienced the current infections with last year's resources? It would have been a wildfire, a plague of cataclysmic proportions.

Fellow Melbournians, we've spent so much time in lockdown... I truly don't think that other Australians can easily comprehend just how debilitating and awful it has been for us. Hope dragged down like loose underpants around our ankles. Greyness haunted our minds. All of this year, I've been aware of a sense of subterranean fear in being around people. I automatically adjust my path if I see other people nearby; I retreat to corners to avoid being within 2 meters or so of others; I continue to stock up on masks.

Stockpile toilet paper? Good lord! I'd rather stockpile P2 masks. (But I don't do that. I'm not that silly.)

At 1:00 pm today, I might try that wordless scream/roar/shout/cry. (I did once stop a train with my scream...)

[springyzone]

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@countessalmirena wrote:

Fellow Melbournians, we've spent so much time in lockdown... I truly don't think that other Australians can easily comprehend just how debilitating and awful it has been for us. Hope dragged down like loose underpants around our ankles. Greyness haunted our minds. All of this year, I've been aware of a sense of subterranean fear in being around people. I automatically adjust my path if I see other people nearby; I retreat to corners to avoid being within 2 meters or so of others; I continue to stock up on masks.

Stockpile toilet paper? Good lord! I'd rather stockpile P2 masks. (But I don't do that. I'm not that silly.)

At 1:00 pm today, I might try that wordless scream/roar/shout/cry. (I did once stop a train with my scream...)

------------------

I agree, I think on the whole, our country has done well.  There have been mistakes and cases of incompetence but we've come through and we don't need to be answerable to other countries or pressure groups who say we 'must' open up to international students or anyone else.

There are no other  biggish countries apart from NZ that I can think of that are doing as well as we are, so they are hardly in a position to tell us what to do. Why should we feel we have to have to open up to having the virus running rampant here?

I also think no one else in Australia really has a clue what Melburnians have been through.

Even a lot of the bright ones are a bit clueless.

Last year a friend of mine was talking to a sister in law, a nurse in NT. She suggested to my friend that she (my friend) could make her own masks, just pop along to spotlight etc and buy some material and elastic. Umm, spotlight and all those sorts of shops were shut. There was a 5km limit in any case and no spotlight within cooee.

Travel over and pick up nurse's grandson in a distant suburb and have him stay at my friend's home? Couldn't be done, 5km limit & no visitors allowed.

Out of staters have a vague idea but they don't know the details.

As for toilet paper. I was shocked to hear that at the start of the present lockdown, some shops were rushed? I can't understand the logic.  Last March/April there was no toilet paper to be had but by the time of our long lockdown, there were always supplies of just about everything, the panic had subsided. So why panic now. I am happy to say there was no rush at my local shops, sanity prevailed.

I'll admit I always keep a spare pack in the laundry now as insurance as I don't want to be caught short with our last roll and none to be had because of panic buying, but one spare pack should be enough for most people to tide them over a week or two.

I don't know if I am foolhardy or not but I haven't been feeling any fear as such. I am disappointed the virus has got away again and that it is affecting Vic again, but as I said earlier, we're always going to be in the front line as this & NSW are where most of the migrants are returning to.

I'm not afraid but I am frustrated. Frustrated on behalf of all those brides, all those caterers, all those shops, all those holiday places that had bookings and have had everything cancelled & their livelihood affected. I feel for all the students who are again missing school.

For those interstaters who don't realise, kids last year missed half the school year. Now they are missing more. 

And I am sick of the farce of home schooling. I have been participating this year. My daughter (ironically a teacher) is having to work from home and be online.

At the same time, she has 2 young kids, one of whom also needs to be online to do his home schooling. Nope, she can't send him to school as he doesn't qualify as she is 'working from home' and it is deemed she can do it. How can anyone working from home and being paid for it justify being off doing home schooling for hours each day?

Fact is, for a lot of the younger children, they are only getting a fraction of the schooling they would get in a real classroom.

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[countessalmirena]

11 new cases today... but they are all linked to existing clusters:

• The Kappa variant cluster at the Arcare Maidstone aged care home - 3 new cases (1 resident, 2 staff members). (This cluster now includes 3 residents, 4 staff members, and 2 family members related to staff.)
• The Delta variant cluster in West Melbourne - 4 new cases (3 children, 1 adult) in one family. (This cluster now includes 14 cases; the second family in this cluster is in North Melbourne.)
• The Kappa variant cluster at City of Whittlesea - 3 new cases. This cluster is connected somehow - missing link - to the Arcare Maidstone cluster. (This cluster now includes 32 cases.)
• The Kappa varient cluster in the Port Melbourne outbreak - 1 new case (cleaner at construction site). (This cluster now includes 31 cases.)

The new cases are linked to specific outbreaks, but it's not known how the Wollert man (index case - for now - for the City of Whittlesea cluster) became infected. We do know that it's connected to the Wollert man who was in hotel quarantine in SA and became infected by another quarantiner there. That wasn't known when he was released from quarantine as he hadn't tested positive. Somehow the Wollert man passed COVID-19 on to someone else - at least 1 other person - because the other cases in this outbreak did not become infected directly from him, but rather from at least 1 other person who remains unknown but who became COVID-positive from the Wollert man and then passed on the virus to another or others.

It's not known how the West Melbourne outbreak occurred. Trying to find the missing link/identifying the upstream source is a matter for a good deal of concern, but the likelihood is that the Delta variant has somehow got into the community from hotel quarantine. We just don't know; genomic sequencing hasn't given us the answer thus far. The thought of people wandering about infected with the kappa variant of COVID-19 but having no symptoms is chilling. I would feel much more comfortable if the link was made and the close contacts could be followed up and isolated. Even current restrictions are not enough if just one of those close contacts is an essential worker, for instance...

It's also not known how the aged care home cluster arose. There's no mystery about its being linked to the City of Whittlesea cluster, but there IS a mystery about how COVID-19 got from any of the persons in the City of Whittlesea cluster to any of the staff or residents in the Arcare Maidstone facility. Essentially that means that there is at least one person about whom we don't know, but who is (or very recently was) infected.

Ditto with the Port Melbourne outbreak. Linked to the City of Whittlesea outbreak but we don't know who is the missing link, the person who contracted COVID-19 from someone in the Whittlesea cluster and who gave it to someone in the Port Melbourne cluster.

At least the majority of these were in isolation already, and at least these are not new unlinked cases. They are linked, and it looks as though the contract tracers have been doing a phenomenally good job.

[springyzone]

This is just a random observation but has anyone else had the thought go through their head that quite a few of the infected people seem to visit an awful lot of places. Do these people never spend a minute at home?

When they are tested positive and asked where they have been, there's a list of places as long as your arm.

I must live a boring life. Apart from a few shops occasionally, I'm not getting out and about all that much.

[imastawka]

Victoria’s Covid restrictions ‘on track’ to ease from Friday as two cases recorded (msn.com)

[countessalmirena]

It looks as though we might just get out of durance vile on Friday. It's excellent news that the Delta variant cluster has been linked to a case in Melbourne hotel quarantine (returned male traveller from Sri Lanka, aged in his 40s, who went into quarantine on 8th May). That means that the contact tracers can now work downstream from that index case.

I have got to take my hat off to Victoria's current contact tracing team and also to the Doherty institute microbiologists at the Microbiological Diagnostic Unit Public Health Laboratory who were finally able (after a great deal of work) to get a high-quality sequence from swabs from returned travellers in Melbourne hotel quarantine, swabs which had previously failed the benchmark of satisfactory quality checks. This happens when the sample for whatever reason is contaminated, or has been damaged in transit, or had an issue at the point of collection. The sequence in those instances cannot be determined with accuracy with normal genome sequencing in the "first run". Because of the seriousness of the Delta variant in the community without a linked index case, the microbiologists on the team put in every possible effort to resequence some possible samples, with the tools at their disposal being Illumina short read and Pacific Biosciences SMRT long read sequencing hardware, advanced robotics and substantial in-house bioinformatics capabilities.

The contact tracing ... well, this time around Victoria's contact tracing really has done a phenomenally good job. I don't think there's been another outbreak like this with so many close contacts, secondary and tertiary contacts, so many tier 1 sites (as well as the tier 2 and tier 3), so many links made, so many people put into quarantine to limit the risk of transmission. I noted that there are still some negative little "news" articles about this individual or that individual having something accusatory to say about current contact tracing and quarantining. I'm buttoning my lips on that.