Disaster? What disaster?
It was good to see the prime minister kicking again on the cricket on Friday. Sends the precise message.
Life goes on. The Poms are being hammered. How good?!
One other message was being despatched by the nursing unit supervisor at Brisbane’s QEII Jubilee hospital. With 100 workers rendered unavailable by the outbreak, the supervisor’s recommendation to these remaining was to “Prioritise duties…cry…no matter you want.”
In Queensland, some 2,000 healthcare workers are unable to work.
“This is sort of a disaster we’ve by no means seen earlier than,” mentioned Beth Mohle of the Queensland Nurses and Midwives Union. A view echoed by the Australian Medical Affiliation’s Dr Maria Boulton: “We're in a disaster in the intervening time; your complete well being care system is mobilising.”
And that’s simply Queensland. And that’s simply now.
New South Wales is working at greater than 40,000 new instances a day. These are official numbers, unlikely to seize the true extent of the unfold – and even then they far surpass what appeared like alarmist warnings lower than a month in the past from the well being minister, Brad Hazzard. Then, he spoke of 25,000 every day instances by the tip of the January.
When the prime minister emerged from Wednesday’s nationwide cupboard declaring colleges would “return and keep again (from) day one in all time period one”, it took simply two days for that plan to crumble.
By Friday, Queensland’s Annastacia Palaszczuk was acknowledging low ranges of immunisation amongst five- to 11-year-olds.
“We is not going to be sending major college college students again in the course of the first week of college if we're heading in the direction of a peak,” she mentioned, foreshadowing additional discussions at nationwide cupboard stage.
If trainer numbers are winnowed like nurses and truckies, it’s not clear how colleges can keep open, not to mention ship regular lessons.
Final October, Scott Morrison’s lamentations over the departure of premier Gladys Berejiklian had been eased by the considered her successor. Dominic Perrottet’s instincts had been at all times strongly in the direction of the “let it rip” college on Covid, views that aligned with the PM.
“A powerful society wants a robust financial system,” mentioned Perrottet in his first speech as premier. He cited “opening up the financial system” as a precedence.
In mid-December, with Omicron already spreading and chief well being officer Kerry Chant glowering behind him, Perrottet introduced the dropping of masks and QR-code mandates outdoors “high-risk settings.”
In hindsight, it appears nuts. Even on the time, epidemiology professor Adrian Esterman declared: “It merely is not sensible.”
After which a bizarre factor occurred. After the preliminary, anticipated rush again to bars and eating places, Sydney folks went into swift retreat.
“Diners are spooked,” reported an ANZ Analysis paper this week. Nationally, client spending “is now at its worst since (the) Delta lockdowns”.
And the capital of the “let’s stay with Covid” strategy has been worst hit of all.
“Sydney spending for the week to five Jan was at its weakest since Covid started”, says the ANZ paper. “Warning about Omicron transmission and disruptions of companies attributable to workers shortages are central to the decline.”
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Staff who're sick or in pressured isolation have disrupted provide chains in order that grocery store cabinets, particularly for meat, fruit and greens, are more and more naked. None of it's a shock to economist Prof Jim Stanford.
“The concept letting it rip – you recognize, taking a deep breath and puffing up our chest and simply going through Covid head-on – would by some means be good for the financial system, was at all times nonsense,” he mentioned in a broadly shared tweet. “You may’t run a wholesome financial system with out wholesome folks.”
Confronted with modelling displaying NSW may discover itself with barely a hospital mattress to spare, in ICU or usually wards, by the tip of January, at the very least a partial coverage backflip was inevitable.
Perrottet says new bans can be enforced on singing and dancing in pubs and golf equipment. Folks have been requested to “minimise mingling”.
Non-urgent elective surgical procedure will even be “paused”, to the frustration of many specialists.
“This isn't simply beauty surgical procedure or minimal surgical procedures,” says Prof Jeff Dunn of the Prostate Most cancers Basis. “These are doubtlessly life-saving or diagnostic surgical procedures.”
The modelling suggests the Omicron wave will start to fall by mid-February. By the anticipated federal election in Might, would possibly the disaster be the place Scott Morrison most needs to see it – in his beloved “rear-view mirror”?
Troy Bilsborough from the strategic consultancy Provocate is just not so positive. A former well being media adviser within the Abbott and Turnbull governments, Bilsborough says Covid is now not a “theoretical” menace.
On official figures some 800,000 Australians have caught it. “Realistically, it's in all probability double that; it's in all probability as much as 2 million,” says Bilsborough.
By the point folks vote, he says, “you’re taking a look at one other few million folks”. Lengthy Covid can be a lived expertise for some. Folks will query if the federal government did sufficient to guard them. He predicts tough new points in industrial relations as staff search readability over day off for power signs.
His “intestine feeling” is that the federal government might need been higher positioned “if they'd saved a lid on the instances”.
Too late now.
However on the upside, we’re thrashing these Poms on the cricket.
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