Thats rubbish, the curves OS weren’t being flattened at all, they were rapidly rising.

Our politicians shat themselves at what may happen knowing that their hospital system was way below par. As usual a massive over reaction based on fear alone.

The politicians are following the best guidance from medical professionals. Doctors aren’t telling us how to fly planes, maybe we should stick to our wheelhouses. Let’s let the people who understand the intricacies of a global viral pandemic advise our nation’s leaders. Australia is the envy of the world for a reason.

No, accountants and lawyers do.

If that is the case why is every state and territory doing things differently? The variation is politics, pure and simple.

There is a lot of variation on the verbal advice given in interviews by the State CMOs.
Australia's failing is that the State Premiers want to keep their own little empires instead of handing all of the CMO's responsibilities to the Federal COM so we could have a country wide policy.
In Qld, at present, the CMO has more authority than the Premier.

And it’s people who believe this that are holding the country back.

What a load of rubbish. It’s like taking aviation advice from the “experts” you hear from in the paper.

If you had any insight into our CHOs you wouldn’t sleep at night. They’re not in the position because of great medical skills or knowledge!

Why are we not considering this? Australia is such a 3rd world country at the moment.

Germany set to abolish quarantine for travellers

Germany will move to abolish self-isolation requirements for travellers who have been fully vaccinated or who have already contracted COVID-19.
https://cdn.newsapi.com.au/image/v1/...7fe8?width=650German Chancellor Angela Merkel addresses a press conference. Picture: AFP.The government’s draft paper would allow millions of Germans to holiday in hundreds of countries over the European summer.

Currently travellers are required to undertake ten days of home quarantine after they return from “high risk” areas including France, Italy and the US.

The new freedoms would not apply to travellers returning from 11 areas with high case numbers of the new variants including India, Brazil, South Africa and the Moselle region of France, which borders Germany.

Travellers would also be required to prove they tested positive for the disease more than a month earlier and recovered.

svhc: Because perfect forgeries of the vaccination and medical certificates required by BorderForce will be available in Third world countries within hours of such a rash decision.

Don't you understand that the reason ScoMo won't let Australians leave the country is to avoid the charge of hypocrisy when he prohibited foreign arrivals?

Do you really want Australia to be swamped with Covid19 refugees?

....or are you just a pilot pining for their lost career?

talking about perfect forgeries.. seems there might have been some presented by passengers on this flight. Regardless, this is exactly why ALL flights from India should have been stopped days ago. I understand federal cabinet are meeting today to decide on this matter. They better bloody do it. Because people are getting way beyond fed up with lockdowns . And the percentage of infected passengers from India is way, way beyond normal numbers. Darwin had 17 in day as did NSW. Ban the flights today.

hotel quarantine can cope, we have had around 500,000 people return to Australia and go through the system over the last year. Yes there have been outbreaks but due to incompetence or people breaking the rules. This could happen with any form of dedicated quarantine camps.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/art...9-landing.html

I’ve read the bios, I’ve heard their advice. It all sounds pretty reasonable. The reason that there is variation state to state is because the resources and demographics of each state vary wildly.

So, scepticaloptimist you seem to be sharing some really great insights into the management of COVID-19. Care to give us a quick run down of your qualifications to do so? Where did you study medicine and virology? Or your MPH? Or are you one of these great people who have ‘educated themselves’ and now know more in one years’ worth of light internet reading than the world’s leading authorities on the subject?

Building a Quarantine camp
 

I doubt that very much.
You are talking about building a small township for a thousand or more transients* in quarantine, plus permanent staff.
Even assuming the Commonwealth decided to simply ignore any requirement for planning permissions, consultations with stakeholders, environmental impact statement, etc - and I think that would be political suicide - you still have to manage the infrastructure issues: roading, electricity, potable water and sewage treatment & disposal. Roading is almost trivial.
The Commonwealth will have to

• negotiate with a lines company to add a point load of some megawatts into a network probably designed to handle a farm every kilometre or so, and then get them to design and build it.
• find a source of potable water, negotiate a supply agreement with the owner and design & build a pipeline to your camp site, probably build an on-site reservoir to give a surge/emergency/firefighting supply too or design and build a complete water supply and treatment system.
• conceptualise, then design and build, a sewage/wastewater treatment plant and outfall.

These are not off-the-shelf purchases, they take months and months and gobs of money to do.
And if the Commonwealth were to go through the normal planning processes, add at least another three to six months.

Sorry, this is at least a twelve to eighteen months' project.

* If you are only going to take one planeload a week - A330 size, empty middle seats, say 150 SOB - and working on a sixteen day cycle (reception day, fourteen days quarantine, cleaning day) - you are going to need four hundred to four hundred and fifty beds. A thousand beds only gets you two flights a week, occasionally three. Daily flights, you're looking at two to two and a half thousand beds.

You cannot tarnish everyone with the same brush. Evidence is becoming clearer and clearer every day:

1. The western vaccines provide strong protection against disease. They provide almost perfect protection against severe disease and death.
2. There is strong evidence that transmission is greatly reduced. And with less Covid doing the rounds, even more difficult to find someone with it.
3. They are still not accepting arrivals from high risk countries.
4. By mid Northern Hemisphere summer, the vast majority of western countries will hit herd immunity.

And to the last line, I say again: I’m amazed by the number of people on this forum who want to diminish their own industry or happy to take the money despite no one down the back paying your wages.

* If you are only going to take one planeload a week - A330 size, empty middle seats, say 150 SOB - and working on a sixteen day cycle (reception day, fourteen days quarantine, cleaning day) - you are going to need four hundred to four hundred and fifty beds. A thousand beds only gets you two flights a week, occasionally three. Daily flights, you're looking at two to two and a half thousand beds.

So Howard Springs!

Lockdown? What’s that? Haven’t had a city wide one let a state wide one in NSW since April/ May last year. 230K people on the northern beaches for a couple of weeks due a super spreader event just prior to Christmas is the extent of it. For those outside the northern beaches, life has been pretty normal since May last year.

I always found it interesting when talking to the staff at the hotel in Perth in early December who were under the impression that Sydney/ NSW/ ‘over east’ was in permanent form of lockdowns and harsh restrictions. They got a shock when I told them life was as normal for us as it was for them.... we just didn’t have an idiot Premier slamming the gate shut every time someone had a sniffle.

Nof to berate scientists at all, but no scientist in any other country that I know of is talking about military camp quarantine rather than hotel quarantine. People are actually allowed to disagree with scientists - heck, disagreeing with each other is like a sport for them. They are going to go with the most conservative option because otherwise they are perceived to be liable.

Two and a half thousand beds is what Perth alone would need.
Plus some (??) accomodation for staff.

https://www.nsw.gov.au/media-release...-for-christmas well that all sounds pretty normal and just like things were in WA at the time....

And yet NSW businesses are complaining vehemently about the year-long and continuing impact on their turn-over.
And every TV newsclip shows Sydney siders walking around masked.

Why is that then? Something doesn't add up.

just had one in WA. Have been many in Queensland. Victoria had god knows how many last year especially. They affect not only people in those states but the whole country. People can’t make holiday plans or have their plans ruined at the last minute. Plus the economic cost.

So, since NSW has weathered the storm so well why has Beryl got her hand out for WA's GST share?

All direct flights from India to Australia suspended for 2.5 weeks. With places like Singapore and the ME also suspending flights from India this effectively cuts off India from Australia:

All flights to India paused, PM announces - ABC News

12-18 months? John Wagner does not agree;

https://www.smh.com.au/politics/fede...04-p56zn3.html

this bloke built an airport, in Australia, in spite of all our bureaucratic and regulatory madness, in record time. It CAN be done, if there’s a will to do it.

I tend to agree with your comments,the doctors & cho's are not fools.
Pilots(of which im not 1) have studied long & hard & do a great job & of course now with the industry running on a day to day basis they are becoming frustrated at ever changing rules etc however if the country was opened up & this spread like wildfire(look at india),we could end up looking to the very people who are being criticised for a quick answer & very likely there wont be one.
I heard a sport commentator the other day make a statement about umpires & the constant criticism of them,he said 'lets have a footy game without umpires & see how that goes'!

Nope, wasn’t sharing insights into the management at all. My qualifications aren’t relevant, nor did I form any opinions based on light reading.

The actual experts in the field of disease management are however close friends, and know most of the CHOs personally. It’s their anecdotes and tales that prompted my comments.

And I repeat, if you heard the stories, you wouldn’t be trotting out the line you did about “following best medical guidance” - which was what I was responding to.

Go on then, tell us the stories.

The modeling of the trajectory of the Indian pandemic must be frightening. That is why the flights are cancelled.

But if you’re a cricketer or celebrity, I’m sure Iwillbealrightjack...

Mate, if I knew you, over a quiet ale I’d love to!

Excellent point ExtraShot and to the best of my knowledge the government hasn't even had the decency to give him an answer one way or the other but happy to be corrected on this.

Cheers Hoss58

Funnily enough the trajectory and deaths were very similar in the US but we never cut flights off from there.

Trajectory in the US was never as bad. India’s daily caseload has gone 6x in a month and no sign of slowing down. 1.6m tests yesterday and 360k cases.
That’s ignoring the fact that India’s numbers would massively underestimate the true extent of the pandemic.

It was that bad and the UK was even worse. If you go buy cases and deaths per million India is not even close. Not to mention this.
Per capita is more important when talking about this. If you were to talk down the street what are the chances of someone having it. Peak US and UK you'd still have a better chance of getting COVID there than India currently.

I think the under reporting in India (and among other developing countries) far exceeds places like the USA and UK however.

Last was that Qld Govt put the proposal to the Feds with no supporting documentation and are now crying that they have not had an answer.

Well here we go again! 2 travelers from PNG were able to mingle with geeen zone passengers, QLD said the risk was low as they tested negative then wholla all of a sudden one of the two test positive. These travelers were every where in BBN terminal. Snap lock down 3 days will fix it tho.

Well that is one way to kill off any demand in Trans-Tasman flying as there were three green zone flights to NZ affected by that event.

A lot of kiwis won’t be travelling purely because they see things like this happening and instantly assume the whole of Australia is just full of incompetents. (Even when their own government are just as incompetent).

I wouldnt be surprised if they direct people on the two NZ bound flights into two weeks of isolation - like the recent case on the PER-MEL flight. What a f*@k-up.

The Tasman bubble needs to be terminated immediately in order to resolve the stark difference in aircrew quarantine rules. If this isn’t a large hole in the cheese then I don’t know what is. 2 days quarantine for New Zealand crew. 14 days for Australian crew. What a fu*ing joke. What’s 2 days and a test going to do when you could be infected but not infectious. It’s generally recognised for the virus to manifest itself takes about 5 days on average. Either New Zealand or Australia is out on a limb here. The Tasman bubble is far from secure. Shut it down until it’s fixed. How the hell was this over looked reeks of incompetence or most probably, political indifference. Any Australian travelling to New Zealand could be exposed easily via lose quarantine rules.

It’s interesting that our Kiwi colleagues haven’t refuted the facts. The ball is in your court bros.

In other travel industries:


In a letter to industry leaders Wednesday night, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) said cruises could resume sailing from U.S. ports in mid-July.

The CDC will require that ships guarantee that at least 98% of crew and 95% of passengers are fully vaccinated. This rule is in keeping with decisions already made by many other countries to require proof of vaccination in order for cruise ships to operate again.

If you take time to read the MoH Air Border Order which was updated this April, you’ll find that Aircrew who operate Red zone flights are not permitted to fly Green Zone flights at all and must be kept separate.

Under the rules in NZ, red zone crew may operate domestically in NZ only after a 72 hour stand down and a negative PCR test, just as it always has been since July 2020. However aircrew must also comply with Australian rules requiring red zone crew to have spent 14 days in NZ before operating a trans-Tasman green zone flight.

But hey, don’t let the facts get in the way of a good story.