I don’t think Australia is a joke. We live in a place the rest of the world wants to be. What I think is a joke is 10000 Australians left the safety of their home and went to India, and are now screaming they can’t get back by yesterday.

You would have to agree just about every other country has bettered our Covid deaths score. If that’s a joke, I like it

Yes I agree most of the world would’ve wanted to be in Australia from March 2020 to mid this year. However as vaccinations start to bring the developed northern hemisphere nations back to normality this northern summer I think that’s going to rapidly change.

Is the present system broke?
With over a 99.?% success rate, I believe it has worked quite well given that hotels were not designed for this.

If we do go down the track of building dedicated quarantine facilities (Wellcamp etc.) how do you propose that they staff these facilities.
There certainly would not be sufficient trained staff in Toowoomba.
If you move staff in, you would need to build staff accommodation.

And that is another reason why regional quarantine centres are not practical. Many parts of regional Queensland (and probably other states) are struggling to get medical staff to cover day-to-day practices before even considering how you would get medical staff to man a quarantine centre, spend 2 weeks in quarantine/isolation themselves after their 'shift' and have a few weeks off before starting the cycle again.

Agree.. Darwin is a 'capital city', but I think the government is going to find it incredibly difficult to find enough specialist medical staff to adequately service the surge capacity of Howard Springs. Even offering incredible pay etc may not be enough. This would further be exacerbated in more regional areas. Somewhere like AVV probably wouldn't have this problem. Toowoomba most likely would.

Medical staff who work with covid patients currently do not need to isolate for two weeks after work. They can go straight out after shift. Why would them working in a camp suddenly require them to have two weeks of isolation?
See the hypocrisy thread.....



Wouldn’t you just build the staff accom at the same time you build the facility? Basically not a big deal.

Would they do that anyway, just because it's a camp site?
They don't do it now when the quarantine is in a city hotel.

But what's the point anyway?
The threat occurs when quarantinees, hotel and security staff walk out the door, not while they are inside.
How do you ensure that a person is 100% free from the disease before you allow them out to mingle?
That will apply regardless of type or location of the quarantine facility.
You could make them stay around Katherine / Exmouth / Christmas Island for an extra few weeks I suppose.
But I think you might get a bit of push back from the locals.

I agree. The others are missing the point and the big picture.

What I think is a joke is that after 12 months of our experts working at the problem, they have come up with no tenable solutions. The vaccine was the answer, the grand plan - and so far they have managed to cock it up at every turn. Lock down and shutting borders was the easy bit - what now?

We will definitely be left behind as the rest of the western world leaves COVID behind them.

We use to pioneer, now we barely follow. It’s embarrassing how scared we are - totally a zero risk nation.

The original plan was, more due to remoteness, for the employees to live on site and quarantine with the returnies. I know someone who does FIFO mining work and they were sounded out for doing it. The plan was something like the kitchen/security/admin come in the day before to prep, next day the returnies come in and quarantine starts. They stay there for 14 days and leave all at the same time. They then get 6 days off and do it again. During the 6 days a seperate team comes in and does a through cleaning. They were going to get the standard FIFO rates and if theres an outbreak and forced to stay longer or get sick they would be compensated for it

Meanwhile the US has just implemented quarantine free international travel this northern summer for fully vaccinated people. We are a pathetic joke, with a pathetic leader that only got the job by knifing one of his own and it’s absolutely incompetent.. and the sheeple follow this fool from marketing? I’m embarrassed by what we have become, a scared bunch of cowards hiding in a fortress island, trying to believe we are safe by imprisoning ourselves….

Now after that rant, I really believe the pressure will build massively and the borders will open earlier than mid 2022, once everyone sees quarantine free travel spreading across the developed world over the next few months. WTF are you supposed to do after being vaccinated? Why a delay to preventing citizens from travelling? ….None Scomo still craps on relentlessly while doing basically nothing..

Don’t worry if Labor with BS at the helm we would be on a lot worse position.

I disagree, I reckon our vaccinations would be close to 20 million by now with Shorten. He just wanted to do too much too quick in last election.
But sure as hell we would now have had quarantine centres built and a much higher vaccination level compared to this baseball hat muppet.

I guess you’ll see how pathetic the public think he is in the upcoming election. My prediction is that it’s going to be a landslide on the back of his handling of Covid alone. I don’t know anyone who is really predicting a Labor win.

No one cares about pilots, the airlines or travel agents. We aren’t seen as hard done by workers, and we’ve had years of record profits (and salaries) before this whole thing kicked off.

Universities are footing the bill for their own quarantine of students outside the daily quota, so the pressure from the education industry has eased somewhat. There’s no overwhelming groundswell from the public to open borders, in fact the opposite is true. The pollsters will have a clear view of public sentiment by now.

I don't think the vaccine program is such a 'debacle' as it is being made out by the media, who in one breath slam the govt for being slow, the next they scare monger about taking said vaccine.
Last year, the government backed four vaccine candidates, 2 of which (AZ and the UQ one) could be made onshore, 2 (Pfizer and Novovax) used technology which was until now unproven. One out of the portfolio of 4, which was chosen before trials had even been completed, failed. We have been caught out by 'vaccine nationalism' -- / Europe using their own facilities to vaccinate their own people, the same in the US. Whoever would have guessed..? Australia is doing exactly the same thing with our AZ production. The fact that many millions of vaccines never made it at the start of the rollout is hardly the federal govt's fault.
I'm based in the ACT while I 'wait out' Covid - and here all nursing homes are pretty much fully vaccinated, as are all health and quarantine workers exposed to critical areas. Something like 15% of the population have been vaccinated by the territory alone (without accounting for federal govt numbers). NSW (appearing to be a bloody competent state government..) and VIC are now breaking their own records each day as more supply comes online. Can't speak for QLD and other states...
The challenge I think is to really tell everyone who will listen to go out and get vaccinated! For the greater good of the elderly in society...
Eventually the borders will open, and as citizens we need to be 'prepared'.

haha Captain Deflection and his crystal ball at work here!
randomly wheel out the old Bill Shorten boogeyman when **** hits the scomo-fan..

In Qld we are still waiting on the Qld Govt to open Vac Centres.
Trouble is the Qld Govt does not have the money for Vac Centres, rather have the Feds pay for it through the Doctors and Medicare

I can’t see this mess ending anytime soon.

Federal, State and Territory governments haven’t helped by operating as silos on most things COVID related. I know who I will be voting for at the next federal election!

Anyone who has been jabbed up should be exempted from travel restrictions, quarantine (as that clearly doesn’t work) and complying with lock down restrictions. Vaccination is the only long term solution with regards to eradicating this virus in my opinion, which will take years.

I live in Darwin and I’m expecting to go into lockdown at anytime due to a community transmission, not originated from Howard Springs but as a result of the behaviour of most of the population up here who believe the territory is insulated from the virus.

It’s ridiculous that the vax centres weren’t part of the roll out plan back in March. Who thought that paying doctors to deliver jabs was the most efficient way forward.

Err what they are at public hospitals