It’s hard to imagine now, but just over a week ago Sydney’s outbreak seemed to have plateaued. Most cases were not infectious in the community. The lockdown seemed to be reining-in the Bondi cluster’s spread.
But while health authorities looked the wrong way, the Bondi cluster moved west. By the middle of last week, it had seeded around Fairfield and Bankstown, working-class areas with large migrant populations. Suddenly, like Dan Andrews a year earlier, Premier Gladys Berejiklian was warning about large family gatherings. Like Andrews, whose lockdown of nine public housing blocks breached residents’ human rights, Berejiklian sent police to blitz south-west Sydney.
As Bondi residents swanned on the beach and sipped their takeaway cocktails, people in the south-west were having their shopping checked by police to make sure they were out for essentials. Yesterday, NSW Treasurer Dominic Perrottet was forced to apologise to Fairfield residents. The government had abruptly announced anyone leaving the area for essential work had to get tested every three days, and by morning, queues at drive-through clinics stretched for kilometres.
Why the west suffered
It’s not surprising this outbreak got worse when it spread to the south-west. People in the Fairfield LGA are more likely to be employed in jobs where it is impossible to work from home than their counterparts in the affluent eastern suburbs. Most households speak languages other than English, and the messaging from white health experts, great for people who spend too much time on Twitter or religiously tune in to 11am pressers, tends not to stick.
Telling people to stay at home doesn’t work quite so easily when you need to rock up to your shift to earn a paycheque. And telling people not to visit grandma is poor advice when, as is the case in many non-white families, grandma lives upstairs. By the time NSW needed to tailor its messaging, turning to volunteer translators and community leaders just like Victoria had to last year, it was too late.
“I think we could have done better messaging,” Chief Health Officer Kerry Chant said yesterday at a conference for multicultural media.
NSW Health’s most recent epidemiological report shows how badly authorities missed what was going on out west. In the week the lockdown was introduced, there were 105.44 tests per 1000 people in South Eastern Sydney, compared to 31.66 per 1000 in South Western Sydney. In the Fairfield Local Government Area, that proportion was 18.30 per thousand, compared with 304.27 in Waverley LGA. At the time, most cases were in the east, where the government briefly introduced a local lockdown. But low testing numbers meant NSW Health was missing chains of transmission on the other side of town.
It’s not surprising this is an area that was missed. Sydney’s media and political establishment, clustered in the inner city, east and north shore, wrinkle their noses at heading west. And it’s not surprising that when the cases started appearing, the response was to send out the cops in a big show of force. This is the part of the city where police once set up a Middle Eastern Organised Crime Squad, after all.
Fairfield Mayor Frank Carbone has hit out at the way people in his suburb had been mistreated.
“This isn’t a crime emergency, this is a medical emergency. I think that people should be treated with respect and I think it doesn’t happen out here in Western Sydney,” he said.
The wrong lessons learned?
When Sydney returns to normal, everyone will find a cautionary tale in the outbreak. For critics of NSW Health’s lockdown-averse approach, which has successfully managed big outbreaks while preserving residents’ freedom, it will be grim vindication. Had Sydney gone harder earlier, things would perhaps look different now. But like the boy who cried wolf, their warnings were ignored.
But there are two more important lessons, critically intertwined, which Sydney should take away instead. The first one is about luck. Sure, Sydney handled previous outbreaks well, through beefed-up testing and finely tuned contact tracing. But one of its biggest was in the Northern Beaches, literally called the insular peninsula. Probably the only part of any Australian city where a localised lockdown could work. Melbourne, comparatively, got extremely unlucky last year, when its outbreaks started seeding in the wrong places. Sometimes, whether an infected person becomes a superspreader is quite simply a matter of chance.
Luck is only part of the picture. The rest is about how, 18 months in, health authorities still sometimes overlook how the virus intersects with race and class inequalities. It’s why kneejerk calls for more policing, harder lockdowns and curfews — pushed by many a media-hungry alarmist pundit — would be the wrong takeaway here. Firstly because such force is always applied unevenly. But also because it’s unclear how flooding shopping centres with cops will have much impact when most transmission is happening in households (there has been one single case of transmission in a shop, zero outside).
People in Fairfield aren’t stupid. They see the hypocrisy of police helicopters which never flew over Bondi, circling their neighbourhoods. More over-policing will further marginalise these communities, and could further reinforce distrust of health authorities, shattering any sense of “all in this together”. And that only makes the next outbreak harder to stop.
We are never all in this together. Many of us are always a lot deeper in it than others. Then there are the people in the underclass whom we don’t even count as us.
Back in 19th century Melbourne the same people who today are grizzling about opening the economy were the same ones resisting the very idea of building a public sewage system as a wildly extravagant indulgence of the undeserving poor. The penny finally dropped that typhoid or diphtheria or measles could cross the river just as easily as the goods they liked to consume and the servants they employed. Only then did the idea of a public sewage system move from the indulgence column to the investment column.
Likewise today, if we continue to insist on the desirability of precarious and ill-paid employment for a significant part of the workforce, and if we keep clinging to the idea that fair and adequate social benefits for all encourages sloth and indolence among the undeserving poor and constitute an unfair impost on the decent, hardworking and most importantly quiet Australians, then we will keep finding that virus crossing the river. (Or, as in the recent cases in Victoria, falling off the back of a truck).
It was the Coalition also under John Howard that created the cheap non-union casualised exploited foreign labour work force for farmers, growers and business people.
Ironically it is also the Coalition that have sold off much of our infrastructure to foreign owners including much to the Chinese Communist Party.
The distribution network in South Australia, foreign owned, is putting experienced technical linesman off and then offering them their job back again but with less pay.
Foreign owned mining companies in the Hunter have been doing the same now for years.
Both Morrison and Berejiklian’s Coalition ruthlessly exploit Australian and foreign workers , when a pandemic comes along it is always the most financially stretched who cop it the worst.
Combine that with a health system that is being continuously eroded buy every Coalition state and federal government and you have a disaster in the making
The biggest threat is civil disobedience inspired by Sky Noise playing both sides of the street as the daddy of Kirribilli and Macquarie Street.
Rupert Murdoch’s misinformation media is a mental disability inflicted on the absorbent gullible.
Murdoch has caused more death and destruction than covid 19, he is an evil psychopath.
Cynically ruthless and entirely about the advertising revenue pain he is suffering.
Hopefully Lachlan won’t have anything left that he can use to continue the insults to our basic intelligence.
I have just read this and again the Morri$sin mad dogs get a mention, and again Murdoch was involved in promoting all of this fraud.
The happy clapper Scott Morri$sin’s Coalition’s QAnon devotee MP Craig Kelly, ”who has also promoted the use of the anti-malarial drug hydroxychloroquine to treat Covid-19 – despite there being no evidence that it works – has been among those promoting ivermectin.
Several Indian media outlets ran stories on Kelly in the past week after he asked Uttar Pradesh to loan the state’s chief minister, Adityanath, to Australia to release ivermectin.”
Huge Study Supporting Ivermectin As Covid Treatment Withdrawn Over Ethical Concerns
https://globalcirculate.com/huge-study-supporting-ivermectin-as-covid-treatment-withdrawn-over-ethical-concerns-medical-research/
“Thousands of highly educated scientists, doctors, pharmacists, and at least four major medicines regulators missed a fraud so apparent that it might as well have come with a flashing neon sign. That this all happened amid an ongoing global health crisis of epic proportions is all the more terrifying.”
Perfect final paragraph expressing the essential contradiction of nu-rite ratbaggery.
If it is a choice between the euroid & amerikan social compact, it is a non-choice.
We’re constantly being told by the PM and the state premiers that they are following the medical advice, which begs the question: did our CHOs not notice that Delta has been spreading more quickly than previous iterations of the virus, and thus needed a quicker lockdown response? Or maybe they did but were overruled by Gladys’ and Scomo’s business masters?
Of course the Coalition’s Queen of Indian Delta has NOT followed advice from health experts! The limo driver she and her good squad tried to criminalize broke no public health measures as THERE WERE NO PUBLIC HEALTH measures mandating those who drive airline crews should be vaccinated or wear masks.
Now we have those uppity exploited foreign health workers, the cleaners at Westmead hospital refusing to enter the hospital’s Covid ward due to claims they were denied access to appropriate PPE. Who would you believe here, the Shredder of rorting documents and the overseer of rampant corruption in her party and state, or desperate underpaid exploited foreign workers who need every hour they can get to survive in this nation of Coalition voting users and abusers.
“…she and her goon squad”?
The official response this morning (Friday) was that extra PPE for the Westmead cleaners “..would pose extra hazards (in disposal)” – nothing to do with cost or lack of equipment.
Warboy
“…she and her
goodsquad.”Great comments Allan. Keep your foot down on the pedal.
TG reports that: ”The Health Services Union has become involved, claiming attempts to resolve the cleaners’ concerns have been rebuffed by the hospital’s management. Gerard Hayes, NSW secretary of the HSU, said:
”Our members are asking for basick health and safety provisions. The fact their requests have been denied is incomprehensible.
We are in the middle of an unprecedented outbreak in NSW, the absolute bare minimum we can expect is that our frontline workers are protected”
Elsewhere in Sydney, at least 70 ambulance workers are isolating after a paramedic in the south west of Sydney tested positive to Covid. A NSW Ambulance spokesman said the worker is believed to have caught Covid in the community, not at work.”
The community transmission is off the richter in NSW and their gold standard of contract tracing is overwhelmed. Coalition’s Howard created casualized work force of foreign, barely english speaking and non english speaking exploited people are doing their best to survive, and with the Delta Bitch refusing to define essential workers, the roads, freeways and highways are clogged with casual workers trying to get their now requested thrice weekly covid tests in Fairfield, having to line up before 4am to have a chance!
This is what the NSW Coalition’s startled rabbit faced Berjiklian is imposing upon those whom her party and government exploit.
There is not a shred of doubt as to that – when profit is threatened, life is cheep-cheep.
But the economy will recover with time, the dead will not and even those who live can be ill for the rest of their lives all
because Liberal governments put money before lives.
Governments lie, people die – no shortage of replacements.
Like doing something about climate change – saving the planet is too expensive.
Yes, how can business save the planet if there is always a profit motive?
This Sydney unfolding mirrors Melbourne. Remember the Toorak skiers bringing covid back from pleasure trips to Aspen? Then heading to their vast beach or country boltholes ( or sailing their boats away) to ride it out while large multi generational families were left imprisoned in public housing high rises? No surprise wealth and privilege play out this way. How can health bureaucrats cut through this effectively with the political masters they report to being uninterested in any whiff of a class, race or gendered analysis? Same ole same ole.
Our political masters are nothing more than maggots crawling feeding on the dead bodies of those who’ve died due to the Morrison Coalition’s refusal to shoulder its two responsibilities, quarantine and vaccination. And Berjiklian never faulted him for it either. Labor Premier’s have thwarted their plan to do a Barnaby Johnson on us and declare a Freedom Day, which in fact is code for the freedom of business to resume its exploitation of us . It hasn’t worked out so well and even here Brad Health Hazzard had a bit of a scare as has one of his fellow stooges in the UK.
Johnson ”defended the lifting of restrictions – amid ongoing rises in cases, deaths and hospitalisations – but urged people to be cautious.
He said: “We’ve got to remember that this virus is sadly still out there. Cases are rising. We can see the extreme contagiousness of the Delta variant, but we have this immense consolation and satisfaction that there is no doubt at all that the vaccine programme has very severely weakened the link between infection and hospitalisation and between infection and serious illness and death.”
”The prime minister and chancellor are now self-isolating after contact with Health Secretary Sajid Javid, who has tested positive for coronavirus.
”No 10 initially said they would not have to isolate, as that were taking part in a pilot scheme that involves daily testing instead.
But opposition parties said it suggested there was “one rule for them and another for the rest of us”.
The PM later said they had “briefly” considered taking part in the scheme.
It comes ahead of the lifting of lockdown rules in England from Monday.”…BBC
The Brexit Pinnacle of Freedom Day Tory style
And while various black and brown transgressors have been luridly splashed across our news pages and screens by the right media, the Northern Beaches patient zero remains comfortably unrevealed. Along with all the other thousands of movie stars, rock stars and political party grandees allowed free movement across our borders.
Any idea who patient zero was?
My money is on a diplomat or a government MP
It will never be, publicly, revealed but PROMIS shows that it was a 737 co-pilot.
A citizen, so not subject even to the ludicrous 24hr purdah turn-around of deadheads (off duty cabin crew).
So why the secrecy?
Were they doing anything wrong or was it just a demonstration of how stupid (lax) the rules are for flight crew?
I doubt it was an airline crew person that would have been publicly declared. I still go for a diplomat
Until Nov 2020 air crew were NOT subject to quarantine isolation as it would have made the already crippled industry unworkable.
When this became public knowledge the outcry led to cosmetic changes and media silence thereafter.
The compromise now is to turn them around asap (the vast majority being foreign) but this cannot be enforced on citizens.
I wonder what lessons are going to come about the urban sprawl, good city design, and support infrastructure. If differences in living conditions matter, then we can look at how our cities are designed and how we choose to cram people into them as a matter of great importance.
Just another way that goes to show bring poor outs one in harm’s way that affluence can buy oneself out of…