So I guess it’s safe to say that despite the official “end” of lockdown 4.0 here in Melbourne; I think we’re all suffering from a degree of lockdown lethargy to some extent.
You can’t blame society as a whole; I mean simple put this is Melbourne’s fourth major lockdown in the space of just over a year, all of varying lengths, and all bar one really, in my mind, have their route causes as the same- i.e. failures in “hotel quarantine’.
The reason I use quotation marks when referring to is is because it’s such a dichotomy that the process itself can’t simple exist because it’s flawed so badly that in my mind it’s a fallacy.
For example- unless a hotel and it’s room is some sort of creation from the mind of Stanley Kubrick, a hotel that has no negative pressure rooms (all of them? I’m open to correction though!); is destined to not only not contain any various forms of airborne transmission of viruses et al; but it’s fundamentally predicated that all it WILL do is just either do nothing to stop the spread (best case) or worst case it’ll cause the mass transmission of a virus or whatever that society knows little about.
In the space of a year, the science has evolved and grown with the knowledge of COVID-19 as it should be; people like to argue when advice changes it is proof that science has no idea what its doing but its the opposite; if science DIDN’T know what it was doing the advice would remain the same- hell if science didn’t evolve and grow we wouldn’t have some of the modern medicines we have nor the discovery in other branches of science!
Where we stand today isn’t where we stood a year ago; our knowledge has grown and evolved. But where we fail- at least in Australia- is the fact that we still insist on people quarantining in a place that’s literally not fit for purpose.
Back in the “good old days” in Victoria we had the Fairfield Infectious Diseases Hospital- which only closed in 1996! Amongst other things seen it its lifetime, Fairfield saw victims of the “Spanish” Flu (really the American flu as it has since been found to have started in Kansas!), the effects of the Polio outbreak and also sadly the HIV/AIDS crisis(!) The point of this, is when Fairfield was closed in 1996 by the “delightful” then-Premier of Victoria Jeff Kennett; it was the last remaining stand alone building designed for infectious diseases, with elsewhere functions being taken “inhouse” into hospitals etc.
Now, while in hindsight it’s probably safe to say that Fairfield probably wouldn’t cope with the sheer number of victims, it would have at least been a good starting point in housing returning travellers and/or local sufferers of COVID-19! While this was happening, we could have got off our backsides and started building much larger facilities in places where the potential for leakage to occur; instead we’re 14 months on and having the same basic arguments over the $$$$.
It’s this repetitive argument that is dragging us all down- just get on with it!
