COVID-19: Discussion of Impact 😷

MelbTV · January 8, 2021, 12:45am

Victoria’s recommendation to screen all hotel quarantine staff daily was approved by all States and Territories at National Cabinet today.

TV.Cynic · January 8, 2021, 2:16am

Tom_TV7 · January 8, 2021, 3:47am

Only took them this long to implement this.

BJT2 · January 8, 2021, 4:20am

I know right…, it’s like spot the obvious.

From today, all UK passengers need to complete a negative Covid test before boarding a flight to Australia.

But this new strain is now spreading around the world (not just in the UK) and its predicted to take hold within the USA in the next couple of weeks.

Shouldn’t testing be made mandatory for all international passengers, prior to boarding any flight?

MrJ · January 8, 2021, 4:24am

Looks like the UK strain is taking off in Ireland:

Also you can see why Israel is racing ahead with their vaccine rollout, last time figures were this bad they had a total lockdown with a 500m radius.

Tom_TV7 · January 8, 2021, 4:42am

Typical of our government. They go far but not far enough.

Squee · January 8, 2021, 5:18am

I would suggest the reason the government hasn’t gone all out with this is that they would be at high risk of having the existing commercial airlines dropping services if such requirements are made mandatory. They don’t want to be put in a position where they have to pay Qantas to carry out repatriation flights if the likes of Emirates / Qatar / SQ cancel passenger services leaving the country with near zero international flights.

Pranks · January 8, 2021, 5:18am

I’d be more worried about it leaking in via the US. Considerable flights inbound directly from the States to all east coast airports daily and it appears that’s where much of the leakage is coming from, namely American based flight crew. Much of the UK/Euro flights are crews based in Dubai/Qatar/Singapore, not living in these virus ridden places like as US/UK. I’m not sure if BA are still flying in via Singapore

turdall · January 8, 2021, 5:31am

Yes it should and I don’t understand why they aren’t doing it.

turdall · January 8, 2021, 5:32am

But this requirement is something the rest of the world have. A friend just traveled to South America and had to provide a negative test before boarding.

MelbTV · January 8, 2021, 9:36pm

Three days of zero new local cases for Victoria.

Good stuff, keep it up .

turdall · January 8, 2021, 9:44pm

So pleased with this. I would assume everyone who was sitting next to the one from the Boxing Day test would have been tested by now.

JohnsonTV · January 8, 2021, 11:14pm

Tom_TV7 · January 9, 2021, 12:51am

I really don’t want this to happen but I suspect Washington DC will be next given the events of Jan 6.

BJT2 · January 9, 2021, 12:56am

Yes it just seems to be getting worse and worse overseas.

MrJ · January 9, 2021, 1:04am

Good to see national cabinet give up on their return traveller aspirations and slash capacity. The risk assessment of maintaining that seemed way off to me.

bacco007 · January 9, 2021, 2:08am

Is it though? Australia’s attitude towards its citizens overseas is not great at the best of times, but the way that they’ve been treated during the pandemic leaves a lot to be desired.

This response is taking the simplest response to an issue that the Federal Government has simply walked away their responsibilities for - we should make more of this, but the reality is that Australia’s attitude towards this appears to be “fuck you, i’ve got mine”

Moe · January 9, 2021, 4:08am

For all the analysis that Victoria closing the border to NSW was because of a lack of confidence in contact tracing here, what does slashing the amount allowed through the nation’s border show about the lack of confidence in the management of hotel quarantine?

We need to get Australians who want to come home, home. It’s more important now there’s this more dangerous variant - do we need to have Australians dying of COVID overseas while waiting for flights home before we take this more seriously?

This surely also means not running the AO? How could we allow a thousand tennis players to Quarantine in Victoria when we’ve just halved intakes of Australians?

foxyrover · January 9, 2021, 4:10am

There won’t be. Where did you get this number from?

Moe · January 9, 2021, 4:23am

Made it up, I don’t think they’ve announced the exact number of players. But apparently in 2019 the number of total players was 769 - not sure if that excludes or includes qualifying.

Plus, there’s the implied that the players can bring coaches/managers. So any offset by a lower total player count, and those who are Australians, could be filled with non-playing people who will travel for the event.

So yeah, I don’t think that’s a wildly outsized estimate, if you have a source that disproves me, go for it. It doesn’t take away the point though.