I’d say that mandatory quarantine is a bit far now but all countries should require a negative test before and after getting on/off the plane to Australia.
The lack of any rules is driving me nuts.
There should be something. We are an island… and our other quarantine requirements are considered extreme by other country’s standards.
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What?
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Where did you read that ?
I don’t think it is at all given that china had repealed most of their cocaine 19 policies and have let Covid-19 run rampant, I think it’s an appropriate reaction. I certainly do not want to see any more lock downs !
If you want to talk racisim politics and. And go have a look at what Trump tried to implement when he was present a Muslim ban and it was not based on the spread of Covid-19.
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Well, we are not in Scomo’s tenue anymore. This fortress Australia thing and letting each country do its own thing rather than one unified global approach was a mistake. Australia was cruel in seperating families for the sake of protecting Australians which only did nothing but delay the time Australians were vaccinated as the Morrison government was incompetent in ordering the vaccines.
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When it comes to Australia’s Covid policy, there’s always been a degree of xenophobia and this is sadly yet another example. Look at the India travel ban (one of the most shameful episodes in Australian history), the way our states and their people turned on each other so brutally in 2021, and lockdown policies that targeted minority communities disproportionately.
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I’m sure we won’t being seeing COVID-related lockdowns regardless in the foreseeable future. We didn’t see any during the omicron sub-variants and natural immunity levels are at an all time high so the community is well-protected.
Which makes this preventative measure kind of moot considering its spread isn’t really being monitored anyway and a negative COVID test prior to departure means nothing when one could test positive on arrival or catch the virus after they board the flight.
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China now is no longer the exception to how the rest of the world handles Covid - there’s no justification to bring in unique policies towards China, when they are doing what we did last year.
There’s nothing that makes a positive case from China more dangerous to the community than a positive case from the US. If it’s about unknowns about new variants - well what’s the action we’d take?
If just testing and only allowing in negative cases worked, we’d have been able to keep the borders open in 2020 and keep the country free of covid. It doesn’t - so if there is a variant, it will enter the country and the community.
If your answer isn’t that we’d lock down again in the face of that - then the border controls can only serve to create suspicion of Chinese people in the community, by suggesting to people that the Chinese uniquely are at risk of spreading some super variant…
As others mentioned above, we’ve been here before with the India bans, and similar before that with Southern Africa, but seemingly never with the US.
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Yep, I think this is an appropriate reaction to China being nearly 2 years behind where the majority of the world is currently at. It doesn’t sit well with me that another surge could happen because China was in denial about their own circumstances. It’s also frustrating that the Australian government were slow to react - what’s more important their relationship with China or the citizens (aka US) that they should be protecting first and foremost ?
I don’t want to go back into lockdown, but I don’t see the issue with some common sense measures to get put in place.
But these measures have to work to be effective. As it stands you can test negative before you leave but still have COVID when you arrive which defeats the purpose of the tests. Also a negative test before departure doesn’t stop you from catching the virus on the flight or in the airport. There really is no point in this requirement and I reckon it’ll be dismantled as quickly as it was imposed.
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Disagree with you on this completly, if you think this is based on racism, thats your business, but with the covid situation at China, I have no problems with anyone from china being forced to do a covid test before they come to Australia and doing quarantine. We did it for two years, why should they have to not do it?
Nah, its the shit bags who are anti-vaxers and anti-chinese people who do that, not Australian politics.
Fuck the US. Why does Australia have to make policy-based decisions based on US decisions?
Pretty sure there’s no quarantine involved. They’d just be denied boarding if they can’t test negative.
As for the US, I think it explains itself. Australia wouldn’t want to look bad to America even though there’s really nothing good that comes from their policies these days.
Most of them would be somewhat influenced by the politics of it though. In America anti-China/Asia sentiments went up because Trump was being an asshole about The ‘China virus’ and many of his followers caught onto it.
Yes, that is true. I completely forgotten about the label Trump used, and ufnrotunetly it has stuck to most people these days (unfortunetly).
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Again we need to stop letting America dictating what we should be doing with our country, I mean see the mess over there?
Prior to widespread vaccination I was 100% behind keeping Australia closed and fully supported the way Mark McGowan handled WA. That was how it should have been everywhere. While everything was unknown it was the smart thing to do.
I’m sorry to all of those who continue to carry on about not being able to see family during that time but there was a lot more at stake and you chose to be elsewhere. Living in the US meant I couldn’t see my family in Perth during that time either but I still fully support the decision to keep everyone out.
That was then.
Now that we know more about this thing and the majority of the population have at least some protection against serious illness there is no reason to return to any of that.
I get that no one trusts the Chinese government, and with good reason, but covid is out there and isn’t going anywhere. Putting restrictions on one country isn’t going to make any meaningful difference.
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What is the sense in the argument Mark Butler and the AMA are making about new variants?
Didn’t we learn with omicron that there is no avoiding new variants? By the time they are discovered they are already everywhere. Unless we close the border to the world permanently as a precaution.
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Because we don’t require it of any other nation, and there’s no supporting rules in place. There’s no testing or isolation rules in place in any other case - someone turns positive the day after they land in the country and can go about their business, but if they are from China and are positive on the day you’re going to turf them from the plane or make them isolate a week or something?
It doesn’t match the covid response we currently have - this policy is entirely based on saying that somehow ‘China Covid’ is scary and dangerous in a way that no other nation on earth is.
What I’m saying is that frequently the US is the source of new variants, and right now travelers from the US are far more likely to spread new vaccine resistant or highly transmissible variants than travelers from China - their case loads are spiking because of their winter combined with the holiday season.
Yet, testing US arrivals doesn’t come up. We don’t even require vaccination for them - something the US does require of Australians entering.
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And even then I’d argue that wouldn’t work given just how many times the virus was able to sneak its way in during the border closure period.
WA/Perth also had an advantage of being the most remote/isolated city in the world. Let’s say the government over there had it easy compared to others jurisdictions. I still believe Perth and WA to this day have no idea what it was like living in 2020/21.
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