@go-tazz wrote:
@chameleon54 wrote:
It really is just silly to deny blatant facts. When you compare the S.A. Marshall governments response to Victorian Dan Andrews response its simply chalk and cheese and the results are there for everyone to see.
If people refuse to put politics aside for a moment and just look at the facts of how the two administrations handled the COVID crisis, how is anyone actually going to learn from the mistakes made. There needs to be some honesty to ensure mistakes like this are not made again. The human and economic costs of partisan allegiance and ignorance are simply too high.
It is chalk and cheese in the vast difference between the two states in that the first warnings SA got were in the Barossa valley so they got early warning in a low density area.
Melboune's outbreak happened in an area that has 5 million people and the whole population of SA is 1.7 million in an area nearly 5 times the size of Vic so there can be no comparing..
Trying to compare is an unjust statement in that you simply can't compare as the circumstances were completely different as a lot of those cases as stated were should not have been Victoria responsibility to start with.
My early take on it was that all people coming in from overseas should've been in isolation away from people and my first thought was something like Woomera.
It would've kept the numbers lower but probably in the to hard basket and hotel quarantine seems like a simple solution.
I remember in the early stages, the government sent Australians from the Diamond Princess into quarantine on Christmas island and we had some people on this forum claiming this was dreadful, inhumane etc
It obviously wasn't, it was the right decision.
Our downfall was not quarantining every single person who arrived from overseas. For a while they were just told to self isolate. Like that was going to happen. 60% of them broke the rules.
Then we didn't quarantine them properly in Victoria and we all know what happened then.
When the government started quarantining people in hotels, the media was all over it and again airing complaints about how inhumane it was to lock people up etc. These were people whose 4 and 5 star hotel costs were being paid by government and who were being given free meals as well. With free TV, wifi and heating etc
A lot of our poor would have swapped places in a heartbeat.
I think hotel quarantine is a simpler solution and quite effective when done competently.
Melbourne has some other factors that made it more at risk than SA. We have higher population numbers, most of them in closer proximity to each other but also we have much higher migrant numbers. The truth of the wave in Melbourne is that many of the outbreaks have been started from migrant groups not doing the right thing. The virus spreads quickly. If you have one person with it, they are likely to spread it to family members.
If you kept to the regulations and had a max of 5 people visit your home, then the spread is more limited than if you have a large family gathering of 40 or 50 and unfortunately that is what happened with one wave.
In my area, most of the virus victims have been migrants. I have a family member in the police force and they were told to treat every sudanese as if they were infectious because it was rife throughout their community.
This isn't to say that the virus discriminates as obviously it doesn't, but if you have people in close contact with any infected person, then it is more likely to spread through that group.
