Originally Posted by
dr dre
Even in your beloved NSW there have been lockdowns and restrictions on multiple occasions as a result of quarantine hotel breakouts (or in NSW’s case ignoring of government granted home quarantine).
What state are you in? Certainly not NSW! There has been one lockdown since May last year. It was the northern beaches on December 20 when they had 30 cases in a day. It was one region in a city of 6 million. Other than that there has been social distancing and mandated mask wearing in shops- the latter only for about a month.
All in all, life is pretty normal for these times and certainly shouldn’t be classed as ‘lockdowns or restrictions on multiple occasions’.
Originally Posted by
dr dre
A lot of prominent epidemiologists and leaders in Australia are calling for remote quarantine.
By definition epidemiologists are not experts in logistics. Their purview also doesn’t take into account the other myriad costs of their advice. It is for politicians to take their advice, weigh it up with the various costs and plans in place and make a decision. So far our politicians have shown to be mostly pretty woeful with lots of knee jerk panic and very little leadership. Only have to listen McGowan press conference to see that in action.
Originally Posted by
dr dre
Should we quarantine hotel workers to the same hotel and pay them handsomely?
Perhaps but I don’t have a good handle on the numbers of people they’re using at each hotel, how they’re rostered, what the testing regime is like, how they go about cleaning, what the risk profile is for individual workers, etc. Perhaps I’ll leave that one to the experts.
I do know that building suitable accommodation for quarantining people in Learmonth is going to take a long time, cost a lot of money, decrease the risk to the cities somewhat (yay!), create significant hardship on individual workers, create some hardship on towns, stretch regional infrastructure to the limit, etc.
I do laugh at the isolations requirements forced on crew returning from Covid ‘hotspots’ like Narita, Singapore, Shanghai and Hong Kong given the precautions crew are taking whilst there but in the mean time the security bloke working directly with infected people is allowed to roam around the country side and WA hadn’t even instituted daily testing despite agreeing 2 1/2 weeks earlier that they’d get onto that.