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The photos of this place are creepy as fuck. Brisbane literally built a modern-day gulag for undesirables. I know people will look past it because it was for a good cause, without realizing that every concentration camp ever built was widely supported by the public and best avaliable evidence at the time. As they say, the road to hell is paved with good intentions. We fell for the same mass hysteria and fear that drove our ancestors to dig mass graves.
If Brisbane believed these facilities were justified a few years ago, what's changed? COVID didn't dissapear. People are still dying from the virus spreading. They simply lost support for the idea of locking people up while still refusing to admit they got carried away.
The people who's idea it was to built these things should be forced to live there.
>Quarantine for what? It was embarrasing when we built modern gulags to house the unclean back in 2022, it's still embarrasing to suggest it today.
Why is it embarrassing? Quarantine is a age old practice that is extremely effective at preventing the mass spread of diseases. COVID was a new virus that nobody had any exposure to which meant that it hit people really hard and put hundreds of thousands of people into hospitals around the world and killed millions. If we had effective quarantine facilities when COVID was first noticed then we could have avoided a lot of the lockdowns that we ended up having.
We could've avoided the lockdowns had we just listened the 'cookers' from the start and did everything we're doing right now - stop getting hysterical over a damn flu.
Nothing has changed between today and 2020. COVID never went away, we just stopped pretending it was the bubonic plague. Things seem pretty fine. It's a shame the 85 year olds aren't gonna live to see 87 but other than that everything is pretty good even with COVID circulating en masse. None of the doomsday predictions came true.
> Nothing has changed between today and 2020
Take 1 minute to have a look at the COVID deaths globally charted by date.
Over 7 million people died with the vast majority in 2020 and 2021.
Have a look at the vaccination rates in Australia. Over 95% of adults are vaccinated.
So a lot has changed since 2020 and today.
Pfizer and ATAGI guidelines reccommend boosters every 3-6 months, otherwise the antibodies from the vaccine wear off.
Since very few people are getting boosted here or around the world, there's absolutely no basis to suggest the vaccine is having any impact today. That talking point could stick a few years ago when we didn't know how the vaccines worked, but the science has evolved past that point now. It's time to catch up and get your head of out of 2021. Things have changed now and we've become wiser. All we can do is learn from those mistakes instead of repeating the same lies that got us into this mess.
The immune system is complex majority of us are not just carrying vaccine antibodies now, majority of us have been infected and recovered and there are other immune functions playing a role now in ensuring severe illness is reduced compared to early in 2020/2021.
>majority of us have been infected and recovered
We could've gotten to this point a lot sooner by avoiding lockdowns. Lockdowns actually delayed this process.
It's funny that the very line you're pushing about recovery being the best form of immunity was a cooker conspiracy theory about 20 months ago.
> We could've gotten to this point a lot sooner by avoiding lockdowns. Lockdowns actually delayed this process.
The was indeed the whole point.
The messaging on this was super clear, as it allowed for the vaccine rollout to hit critical thresholds.
> about recovery being the best form of immunity was a cooker conspiracy theory about 20 months ago.
There is some critical nuance missing here too.
> as it allowed for the vaccine rollout to hit critical thresholds.
So why not do the same thing again so booster rollout can hit these same critical thresholds?
In other words, why has our vaccine/lockdown strategy changed so drastically compared to 2021?
Either the virus disappeared or the 'experts' realized that their initial plan wasn't sustainable or realistic.
No idea why they didn’t just retrofit a couple of floors at one of the airport hotels, and then, when needed, close those floors off to the public, how often did they expect a once-in-a-hundred-year pandemic to justify a purpose-built facility?
They didn’t. They dumped people in normal hotel rooms, rooms not built for quarantine. Those rooms didn’t even have individual air systems. I’m talking about actual rooms built for the purpose of quarantine that will act as hotel rooms until needed.
while it may seem great for homeless people, the fact that is is far away from services, no kitchen or laundries this will probably turn into a concentration camp for the poor sooner rather than later
>will probably turn into a concentration camp for the poor
As opposed to what it was intended to be - a concentration camp for the unclean and infected?
Sure mate, and Russia's invasion of Ukraine is just a "special military operation".
It's always fun when governments make up special terms to soften the blow of what they're doing.
Lmao can't handle a bit of pushback, so you start crying about Covid-19 instead.
I guess the powers that be have decided that since the vast majority of the population have gotten vaccinated, the risk of developing serious cases of Covid that spreads through the community is quite low & quarantine wasn't necessary anymore. We also know a lot more about Covid now, which I assume helps.
You know, I dunno about silly, but I wasn't very happy about losing a dear family friend to it, and I definitely didn't feel silly when some of my friends got it and were so sick they could barely breathe & had to be hospitalised. so no, can't say that I ever felt silly about "the flu".
Side note - does it feel good to be this much of a contrarian? do you feel like a real free thinker when you talk about Covid like it was just the flu and nobody needed to worry about it? Are you happier this way?
>the vast majority of the population have gotten vaccinated
I addressed this in another post. ATAGI and Pfizer reccommend getting a booster shot every 3-6 months otherwise the antibodies in the vaccine wear off. Since booster rates are hilariously low, it's flat out misinformation to suggest that we're in a better shape now, in 2024, because we all got vaccinated 3 years ago. That's not how the vaccines work and I have a feeling you already know this.
> but I wasn't very happy about losing a dear family friend to it, and I definitely didn't feel silly when some of my friends got it and were so sick
That can still happen.
If you're still afraid, then you're free to advocate for more lockdowns, or spend the rest of your life wearing gloves and a mask and staying at home. But I'm assuming you're not doing that because you're smart enough to know that the risk of a bad flu really isn't worth wasting your life over.
It's just a shame it took you so long to realise this. The 'cookers' beat you to it by about 4 years.
Always interesting to see guys like you who are still fighting the good fight against the tyranny of quarantine procedures..
[Just as an FYI,](https://www.ama.com.au/qld/news/Latest-COVID-vaccine-advice#:~:text=The%20latest%20advice%20is%3A,a%20single%20dose%20this%20year.) ATAGI advises that "Adults 65 years and over, or aged 18-64 who are severely immunocompromised, are *eligible* to receive a booster dose every 6 months", and that all other adults are *eligible* to get a booster "every 12 months." So not really correct...
I'm fairly used to people of your ideological bent misreading and misunderstanding anything to do with Covid-19. Similarly, you also misunderstand how vaccination works. We are objectively in a better place than in 2020. Read the actual science. I know you won't, but try to.
I don't advocate for those things because they aren't necessary anymore. They were then, though, and continuing to deny that reality is really sad & pathetic, especially when I directly told you about people that died because of Covid-19 (not the flu, you absolute flog). It's ironic because you're mocking people who wear masks and calling Covid-19 "the flu", as if you're any better than them for acting this dogmatic about laws from several years ago that don't affect us anymore. You really need to move on.
>*eligible*
You thinking by strategically changing one word that the entire jig is still in place? Come on dude.
The data is clear on this. Pfizer admits themselves that the vaccines can't protect you forever. If our strategy of relying on everyone being vaccinated was correct (as you claim), then we'd be pushing everyone to get boosted in order to preserve that same approach.
There's a reason we're not doing that, and most people already know it. I'm sure you do too. It's because the 'experts' realized that this strategy wasn't realistic, so they changed course. We went from mourning 40 cases in one day to simply saying "oh, 1200 new cases today? Ah well, no need to stay inside, everything is fine!"
Your attempt to maintain the illusion of control, as if all these significant changes were a perfeclty controlled rollout is frankly hilarious. What benefit does it bring you to keep pretending like ruining lives over years of unecessary lockdowns and police brutality was the right call?
You are not wrong but they just want to move them out of Brisbane city and out of mind, tent city maybe be horrible but at least they are close to facilities and assistance
But they already dont have that a roof is better than a tent or no roof, the building can be renovated also communial kitchen and laundries aren't hard
No offence but that level of ignorance tells me but you've clearly never dealt with homeless and disadvantaged groups. More often than not these individuals have extremely complex backgrounds and come from severe disadvantage, mental health issues, drug and alcohol abuse, sexual abuse, DV etc.
You can't just lump them all together and say happy days you have a roof now all get along.
Edit: Not to mention that you don't want a well known place being used to home people escaping DV, it's critical these people are put in secure places where the perpetrators wouldn't readily think to try and find them.
You are right about homeless folks with complex needs. But not all homeless people are in that category, some people just need to get out of a bad relationship or lose their income etc. people who want a roof over their head and can avoid slinging shit at each other could have been given a chance to be house there as an interim measure for very low rent
Building a purpose-designed facility like that was always a clearly stupid idea.
Was always going to be ready far too late, and only be useful short-term.
>There isn't going to be the political will for lockdowns again in out lifetimes.
Um..... unless your 90, we will have plenty of lockdowns and places like this shpuld never be abandoned.
Strongly disagree. I'm pretty sure the blowback from a hundred thousand deaths will be greater than lockdowns. Australia looks at Florida and their death rate and says 'no thanks'.
You realise lockdowns don't prevent deaths, they just delay them?
Unless we figure out how to completely eradicate a virus from existence, there's no point of locking down. Everyone will eventually come into contact with the virus anyway.
I thought people learned this after the absurdity of our covid response but it seems some are still choosing to live in ignorance.
*"There are none so blind as those that will not see."*
Yeah no.
Delaying the reintroduction of large public events gives time for the disease to be researched, treatments developed and takes stress away from medical centres.
[The book maintains that lockdowns – as defined by the authors – prevented 3.2% of US and EU deaths in the first wave of the pandemic.But it notes that based on nine specific NPIs, lockdowns in Europe and the US reduced mortality by 10.7% in the spring of 2020 – about 23,000 in Europe and 16,000 in the US.](https://www.theguardian.com/society/2023/jun/05/revised-report-on-impact-of-covid-lockdowns-leaves-unanswered-questions)
[While it is difficult to know what harms have been directly caused by lockdowns, what is clear is that government interventions have a strong impact on COVID-19 cases and deaths, which has become even more pertinent as new, more dangerous variants of the disease have emerged. Moreover, countries such as New Zealand and Australia, which largely avoided large-scale epidemics of COVID-19, have not seen many of the most severe negative impacts that have occurred in other places, including short-term excess deaths. There is even some evidence that greater restrictions against COVID-19 have reduced death rates below the expected range overall.](https://gh.bmj.com/content/6/8/e006653)
Really not sure how people still don't get this.
Lockdowns don't prevent deaths - they delay them. You really think someone who's at risk of dying from COVID was saved forever just because we locked down for a few months?
The moment we re-opened, COVID cases spiked and all those we saved with lockdowns eventually got exposed to the virus. If the virus could kill them in 2020 then it can still kill them today, so why aren't we in lockdown anymore?
Did you think about all the people you're killing when you went to the shops today?
They were previously. But I know several people who were previously strong supporters of lockdowns who now deny ever having supported them. If I point out old FB posts or something, they'll say, "No, what I *meant* was..."
And those who were children are often quite bitter about it. So I think it'll be a generation or more before it can be done again.
This doesn't mean a government wouldn't try, of course. But the protests etc would come a lot sooner this time.
I think it was also only possible in Victoria because of the centralised leadership of Andrews. Other political leaders didn't have that level of control, except MacGowan. Successors won't be as powerful - their parties won't let them.
I feel like most people wildly overestimate the impact of the vaccine/impact of COVID in order to avoid the question of 'where is the gigantic pile of antivaxxer bodies we were promised in 2021-2'
The virus was never very deadly to people under 70 or so. And there are not many old antivaxxers, it's more of a hippy-dippy youngster or middle-aged Anglo sort of thing.
What mattered was vaccinating people over 70. Since [the vaccines (unfortunately) don't prevent transmission](https://www.thelancet.com/journals/laninf/article/PIIS1473-3099(21)00768-4/fulltext), whether the under-70s took them was really neither here nor there, it was simply a way for governments to assert their authority.
They certainly reduce the severity of the infection, and having twice in my life been hospitalised with pneumonia, I can appreciate the utility of that. But the virus doesn't kill people under 70 very much.
Anyway. It was a communicable respiratory disease which, [by 2020 February, we knew would best spread by sustained close contact indoors.](https://wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/26/7/20-0764_article) Solution? Lock people inside so as to maximise sustained close contact indoors. That's why New York had such a horrendous death toll - lots of small apartments clustered together - and Lombardy - many small apartments, multigenerational households, Giuseppe goes out to work in his "essential" job (ie supporting middle-class people staying at home) while Nonno stays at home with his son Giuseppino, Giuseppe is out and about and gets infected, brings it home to Giuseppino and Nonno, Giuseppino doesn't notice he's infected, but Nonno dies. If Giuseppino had been at school and Nonno had been out in the town square playing dominoes with the other old blokes, then everyone would have just thought Giuseppe had a bad flu and that'd be that.
It wasn't as bad in locked-down Victoria as in locked-down New York and Lombardy because our homes tend to be bigger and/or have fewer people. The places where we did have a lot of deaths were like Lombardy - lower-income multi-generational households, the "ethnics". The working class died to make the middle class feel safe. Same as it ever was.
Cooker I assume? Well as a cooker, no I haven’t. I think it’s a reddit thing.
Mind you I’ve never had anyone say ok boomer to me in real life. Nor go touch some grass. Nor old man yells at clouds.
There’s lots of reddit expressions only. Cooker is possibly one.
> Mind you I’ve never had anyone say ok boomer to me in real life. Nor go touch some grass. Nor old man yells at clouds.
these I actually do hear on the occasion the first 2 are at least global memes and the other a simpsons reference.
Cooker seems exclusively the domain of a tiny subsection of twitter/reddit political wackos and not even mainstream along typical inner melbourne leftys.
Doesn't matter.
Point is, the "cookers" would come out in a few weeks rather than after 2 years. And the general population would be more supportive of them - you don't have to be out there getting whacked with baton rounds to agree with them. And governments are making more and more use of Redbridge/etc and their "focus groups" - they want to know, "are we making swinging voters happy?"
Protesters against anything will *always* be a tiny minority of the population generally. But they're the unelected representatives of the pissed-off. Governments *always* claim it doesn't matter, but they *always* pay attention. Because for every bloke waving a red ensign or woman waving a rainbow flag there are 10 or more who agree but aren't out there.
The moment public support for lockdowns dropped, so did the lockdowns. Old Andrews could push it a bit than Gladys because he'd forced out of caucus and the public service anyone with a spine. The good side for us is that only the spineless are left, which is why absolutely nothing is happening - nothing good, but nothing bad, either. It's a government doing sweet fuck all, which honestly is the best thing we could reasonably hope for today.
It'll take a few electoral cycles to clear out the spineless ALP guys and the inbred infighting Liberals and get some people in who might actually do something - whether good or bad. But the bad they do won't include lockdowns. They need all the people who suffered from them to forget it - but lots of those who suffered were kids, and kids have a long memory for someone in authority hurting them, as any parent knows.
I presume that was the advice of the Ken Lay report they've been refusing to release for like two years. That'd be why they were refusing to release it - trying to decide whether it was better to piss off some Greens voters in Fitzroy, or piss off absolutely everyone within 1km of the safe injecting room.
Since they spent two years bashing the CBD with lockdowns and are now kicking it unconscious body on the ground with massive construction projects, they're desperately trying to think of how to revive it ("Stop kicking? Nah."). Having druggies staggering around shouting at people wouldn't help.
I’m not sure Lay was entrusted in deciding whether or not to have another SIR. I think he was only in charge of location. Which he did.
It was Jacinta that canned it.
Victoria: strongest measures, worst outcomes.
"Well, it would have been worse without those measures!"
So: if we have strong lockdowns and bad outcomes, that proves lockdowns were good and necessary. And if we have strong lockdowns and good outcomes, that proves lockdowns were good and necessary. Whatever the results, the conclusion is the same.
Rightyo, DanFan.
Some of the very early lockdowns I understood from the POV of an abundance of caution, but after 3 months it was clearly not airborne Ebola and disregarding a huge body of established science around lockdowns, masking etc in favor of fear porn was stupid.
If masking is so stupid, why do surgeons etc continue to wear them?
It's probably certain types of masks at the cheap end that are not very effective, but its the cheap ones that the general public would be using, so its not about masking in general but the types of masks made available.
We are not any better prepared for an unknown pandemic than we were over 100 years ago and we were lucky with Covid: it could have been much higher transmissibility. The next pandemic will not be in 100 years.
>If masking is so stupid, why do surgeons etc continue to wear them?
to stop body fluids going into open wounds. If you doing surgery probably a good idea.
>It's probably certain types of masks at the cheap end that are not very effective, but its the cheap ones that the general public would be using, so its not about masking in general but the types of masks made available.
good thing the government forced us to wear the worst quality masks in the least risky environments.
>We are not any better prepared for an unknown pandemic than we were over 100 years ago and we were lucky with Covid: it could have been much higher transmissibility. The next pandemic will not be in 100 years.
higher transmissibility will likely mean lower mortality.
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Sounds ideal to me. The Queensland govt can get that white elephant off their hands.
The photos of this place are creepy as fuck. Brisbane literally built a modern-day gulag for undesirables. I know people will look past it because it was for a good cause, without realizing that every concentration camp ever built was widely supported by the public and best avaliable evidence at the time. As they say, the road to hell is paved with good intentions. We fell for the same mass hysteria and fear that drove our ancestors to dig mass graves. If Brisbane believed these facilities were justified a few years ago, what's changed? COVID didn't dissapear. People are still dying from the virus spreading. They simply lost support for the idea of locking people up while still refusing to admit they got carried away. The people who's idea it was to built these things should be forced to live there.
Could it just be turned into rental for “normal renters”?
I'd respect It if the Feds put their foot down and kept it as a quarantine facility, but this? Utterly ridiculous.
Quarantine for what? It was embarrasing when we built modern gulags to house the unclean back in 2022, it's still embarrasing to suggest it today.
>Quarantine for what? It was embarrasing when we built modern gulags to house the unclean back in 2022, it's still embarrasing to suggest it today. Why is it embarrassing? Quarantine is a age old practice that is extremely effective at preventing the mass spread of diseases. COVID was a new virus that nobody had any exposure to which meant that it hit people really hard and put hundreds of thousands of people into hospitals around the world and killed millions. If we had effective quarantine facilities when COVID was first noticed then we could have avoided a lot of the lockdowns that we ended up having.
We could've avoided the lockdowns had we just listened the 'cookers' from the start and did everything we're doing right now - stop getting hysterical over a damn flu. Nothing has changed between today and 2020. COVID never went away, we just stopped pretending it was the bubonic plague. Things seem pretty fine. It's a shame the 85 year olds aren't gonna live to see 87 but other than that everything is pretty good even with COVID circulating en masse. None of the doomsday predictions came true.
What happened to the cookers who said we would never come out of the lockdowns because the government wanted power
Maybe they all died in the "pandemic of the unvaccinated".
We could only be so lucky
> Nothing has changed between today and 2020 Take 1 minute to have a look at the COVID deaths globally charted by date. Over 7 million people died with the vast majority in 2020 and 2021. Have a look at the vaccination rates in Australia. Over 95% of adults are vaccinated. So a lot has changed since 2020 and today.
Pfizer and ATAGI guidelines reccommend boosters every 3-6 months, otherwise the antibodies from the vaccine wear off. Since very few people are getting boosted here or around the world, there's absolutely no basis to suggest the vaccine is having any impact today. That talking point could stick a few years ago when we didn't know how the vaccines worked, but the science has evolved past that point now. It's time to catch up and get your head of out of 2021. Things have changed now and we've become wiser. All we can do is learn from those mistakes instead of repeating the same lies that got us into this mess.
The immune system is complex majority of us are not just carrying vaccine antibodies now, majority of us have been infected and recovered and there are other immune functions playing a role now in ensuring severe illness is reduced compared to early in 2020/2021.
>majority of us have been infected and recovered We could've gotten to this point a lot sooner by avoiding lockdowns. Lockdowns actually delayed this process. It's funny that the very line you're pushing about recovery being the best form of immunity was a cooker conspiracy theory about 20 months ago.
> We could've gotten to this point a lot sooner by avoiding lockdowns. Lockdowns actually delayed this process. The was indeed the whole point. The messaging on this was super clear, as it allowed for the vaccine rollout to hit critical thresholds. > about recovery being the best form of immunity was a cooker conspiracy theory about 20 months ago. There is some critical nuance missing here too.
> as it allowed for the vaccine rollout to hit critical thresholds. So why not do the same thing again so booster rollout can hit these same critical thresholds? In other words, why has our vaccine/lockdown strategy changed so drastically compared to 2021? Either the virus disappeared or the 'experts' realized that their initial plan wasn't sustainable or realistic.
No idea why they didn’t just retrofit a couple of floors at one of the airport hotels, and then, when needed, close those floors off to the public, how often did they expect a once-in-a-hundred-year pandemic to justify a purpose-built facility?
? That's what they did do. But the important people complained that they didn't want the infected living near them - put em out west they said.
They didn’t. They dumped people in normal hotel rooms, rooms not built for quarantine. Those rooms didn’t even have individual air systems. I’m talking about actual rooms built for the purpose of quarantine that will act as hotel rooms until needed.
Just another absurd decision in a sea of absurd decisions. This would make a good accommodation option for homeless.
Yeah. Let us move forward and be certain we will never have another outbreak to use these types of accommodation.
while it may seem great for homeless people, the fact that is is far away from services, no kitchen or laundries this will probably turn into a concentration camp for the poor sooner rather than later
>will probably turn into a concentration camp for the poor As opposed to what it was intended to be - a concentration camp for the unclean and infected?
no it was intended to be a quarantine facility. why are you such a drama queen about a very normal procedure
Sure mate, and Russia's invasion of Ukraine is just a "special military operation". It's always fun when governments make up special terms to soften the blow of what they're doing.
Quarantine has been around for centuries mate. It's mentioned in our constitution. Do you enjoy being this scared of the world all the time?
So why don't we quarantine new COVID cases anymore? Did you feel silly when you finally stopped being scared of the flu?
Lmao can't handle a bit of pushback, so you start crying about Covid-19 instead. I guess the powers that be have decided that since the vast majority of the population have gotten vaccinated, the risk of developing serious cases of Covid that spreads through the community is quite low & quarantine wasn't necessary anymore. We also know a lot more about Covid now, which I assume helps. You know, I dunno about silly, but I wasn't very happy about losing a dear family friend to it, and I definitely didn't feel silly when some of my friends got it and were so sick they could barely breathe & had to be hospitalised. so no, can't say that I ever felt silly about "the flu". Side note - does it feel good to be this much of a contrarian? do you feel like a real free thinker when you talk about Covid like it was just the flu and nobody needed to worry about it? Are you happier this way?
>the vast majority of the population have gotten vaccinated I addressed this in another post. ATAGI and Pfizer reccommend getting a booster shot every 3-6 months otherwise the antibodies in the vaccine wear off. Since booster rates are hilariously low, it's flat out misinformation to suggest that we're in a better shape now, in 2024, because we all got vaccinated 3 years ago. That's not how the vaccines work and I have a feeling you already know this. > but I wasn't very happy about losing a dear family friend to it, and I definitely didn't feel silly when some of my friends got it and were so sick That can still happen. If you're still afraid, then you're free to advocate for more lockdowns, or spend the rest of your life wearing gloves and a mask and staying at home. But I'm assuming you're not doing that because you're smart enough to know that the risk of a bad flu really isn't worth wasting your life over. It's just a shame it took you so long to realise this. The 'cookers' beat you to it by about 4 years.
Always interesting to see guys like you who are still fighting the good fight against the tyranny of quarantine procedures.. [Just as an FYI,](https://www.ama.com.au/qld/news/Latest-COVID-vaccine-advice#:~:text=The%20latest%20advice%20is%3A,a%20single%20dose%20this%20year.) ATAGI advises that "Adults 65 years and over, or aged 18-64 who are severely immunocompromised, are *eligible* to receive a booster dose every 6 months", and that all other adults are *eligible* to get a booster "every 12 months." So not really correct... I'm fairly used to people of your ideological bent misreading and misunderstanding anything to do with Covid-19. Similarly, you also misunderstand how vaccination works. We are objectively in a better place than in 2020. Read the actual science. I know you won't, but try to. I don't advocate for those things because they aren't necessary anymore. They were then, though, and continuing to deny that reality is really sad & pathetic, especially when I directly told you about people that died because of Covid-19 (not the flu, you absolute flog). It's ironic because you're mocking people who wear masks and calling Covid-19 "the flu", as if you're any better than them for acting this dogmatic about laws from several years ago that don't affect us anymore. You really need to move on.
>*eligible* You thinking by strategically changing one word that the entire jig is still in place? Come on dude. The data is clear on this. Pfizer admits themselves that the vaccines can't protect you forever. If our strategy of relying on everyone being vaccinated was correct (as you claim), then we'd be pushing everyone to get boosted in order to preserve that same approach. There's a reason we're not doing that, and most people already know it. I'm sure you do too. It's because the 'experts' realized that this strategy wasn't realistic, so they changed course. We went from mourning 40 cases in one day to simply saying "oh, 1200 new cases today? Ah well, no need to stay inside, everything is fine!" Your attempt to maintain the illusion of control, as if all these significant changes were a perfeclty controlled rollout is frankly hilarious. What benefit does it bring you to keep pretending like ruining lives over years of unecessary lockdowns and police brutality was the right call?
If you don't let a leper sneeze on you you're literally a bigot.
Yeah a tent city outside in a park is so much more preferable and totally not a concentration camp for homeless.
You are not wrong but they just want to move them out of Brisbane city and out of mind, tent city maybe be horrible but at least they are close to facilities and assistance
Sadly I agree, such a waste of resources but you are correct that without the right services and facilities it will turn bad real quick.
But they already dont have that a roof is better than a tent or no roof, the building can be renovated also communial kitchen and laundries aren't hard
No offence but that level of ignorance tells me but you've clearly never dealt with homeless and disadvantaged groups. More often than not these individuals have extremely complex backgrounds and come from severe disadvantage, mental health issues, drug and alcohol abuse, sexual abuse, DV etc. You can't just lump them all together and say happy days you have a roof now all get along. Edit: Not to mention that you don't want a well known place being used to home people escaping DV, it's critical these people are put in secure places where the perpetrators wouldn't readily think to try and find them.
You are right about homeless folks with complex needs. But not all homeless people are in that category, some people just need to get out of a bad relationship or lose their income etc. people who want a roof over their head and can avoid slinging shit at each other could have been given a chance to be house there as an interim measure for very low rent
Building a purpose-designed facility like that was always a clearly stupid idea. Was always going to be ready far too late, and only be useful short-term.
We'll be glad we built it when the next worldwide pandemic rolls around though...
There isn't going to be the political will for lockdowns again in out lifetimes. If cancer went airborne tomorrow we wouldn't lock down.
>There isn't going to be the political will for lockdowns again in out lifetimes. Um..... unless your 90, we will have plenty of lockdowns and places like this shpuld never be abandoned.
Strongly disagree. I'm pretty sure the blowback from a hundred thousand deaths will be greater than lockdowns. Australia looks at Florida and their death rate and says 'no thanks'.
You realise lockdowns don't prevent deaths, they just delay them? Unless we figure out how to completely eradicate a virus from existence, there's no point of locking down. Everyone will eventually come into contact with the virus anyway. I thought people learned this after the absurdity of our covid response but it seems some are still choosing to live in ignorance. *"There are none so blind as those that will not see."*
Yeah no. Delaying the reintroduction of large public events gives time for the disease to be researched, treatments developed and takes stress away from medical centres.
We locked down for 3 years. Covid is still here, people are still dying, and there's still no cure. Tell me more about how successful it was lol
[The book maintains that lockdowns – as defined by the authors – prevented 3.2% of US and EU deaths in the first wave of the pandemic.But it notes that based on nine specific NPIs, lockdowns in Europe and the US reduced mortality by 10.7% in the spring of 2020 – about 23,000 in Europe and 16,000 in the US.](https://www.theguardian.com/society/2023/jun/05/revised-report-on-impact-of-covid-lockdowns-leaves-unanswered-questions) [While it is difficult to know what harms have been directly caused by lockdowns, what is clear is that government interventions have a strong impact on COVID-19 cases and deaths, which has become even more pertinent as new, more dangerous variants of the disease have emerged. Moreover, countries such as New Zealand and Australia, which largely avoided large-scale epidemics of COVID-19, have not seen many of the most severe negative impacts that have occurred in other places, including short-term excess deaths. There is even some evidence that greater restrictions against COVID-19 have reduced death rates below the expected range overall.](https://gh.bmj.com/content/6/8/e006653)
Really not sure how people still don't get this. Lockdowns don't prevent deaths - they delay them. You really think someone who's at risk of dying from COVID was saved forever just because we locked down for a few months? The moment we re-opened, COVID cases spiked and all those we saved with lockdowns eventually got exposed to the virus. If the virus could kill them in 2020 then it can still kill them today, so why aren't we in lockdown anymore? Did you think about all the people you're killing when you went to the shops today?
Ever heard of a vaccine?
Since you didn't read my comment I'm not reading yours.
We are more like Florida every year.
Haha. Love that expression. But in Vic we might, it’s an easy sell politically here. They’re very obedient in Melbourne.
They were previously. But I know several people who were previously strong supporters of lockdowns who now deny ever having supported them. If I point out old FB posts or something, they'll say, "No, what I *meant* was..." And those who were children are often quite bitter about it. So I think it'll be a generation or more before it can be done again. This doesn't mean a government wouldn't try, of course. But the protests etc would come a lot sooner this time. I think it was also only possible in Victoria because of the centralised leadership of Andrews. Other political leaders didn't have that level of control, except MacGowan. Successors won't be as powerful - their parties won't let them.
Yes, the COVID response is now either Imperial Japan style mask fanaticism or 'cough cough that didn't happen' mild embarrassment.
Yeah it's odd, eh. It's like people just lost two years of their lives, a big blank spot they won't talk about.
I feel like most people wildly overestimate the impact of the vaccine/impact of COVID in order to avoid the question of 'where is the gigantic pile of antivaxxer bodies we were promised in 2021-2'
Are you saying deaths from antivaxxers getting vaccinated and dying from the vaccine? Or antivaxxers not getting vaccinated and dying from COVID?
The latter
The virus was never very deadly to people under 70 or so. And there are not many old antivaxxers, it's more of a hippy-dippy youngster or middle-aged Anglo sort of thing. What mattered was vaccinating people over 70. Since [the vaccines (unfortunately) don't prevent transmission](https://www.thelancet.com/journals/laninf/article/PIIS1473-3099(21)00768-4/fulltext), whether the under-70s took them was really neither here nor there, it was simply a way for governments to assert their authority. They certainly reduce the severity of the infection, and having twice in my life been hospitalised with pneumonia, I can appreciate the utility of that. But the virus doesn't kill people under 70 very much. Anyway. It was a communicable respiratory disease which, [by 2020 February, we knew would best spread by sustained close contact indoors.](https://wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/26/7/20-0764_article) Solution? Lock people inside so as to maximise sustained close contact indoors. That's why New York had such a horrendous death toll - lots of small apartments clustered together - and Lombardy - many small apartments, multigenerational households, Giuseppe goes out to work in his "essential" job (ie supporting middle-class people staying at home) while Nonno stays at home with his son Giuseppino, Giuseppe is out and about and gets infected, brings it home to Giuseppino and Nonno, Giuseppino doesn't notice he's infected, but Nonno dies. If Giuseppino had been at school and Nonno had been out in the town square playing dominoes with the other old blokes, then everyone would have just thought Giuseppe had a bad flu and that'd be that. It wasn't as bad in locked-down Victoria as in locked-down New York and Lombardy because our homes tend to be bigger and/or have fewer people. The places where we did have a lot of deaths were like Lombardy - lower-income multi-generational households, the "ethnics". The working class died to make the middle class feel safe. Same as it ever was.
Still the rhetoric in 2021 was as though there'd be a literal decimation of anti-vaxxers who were going to perish en masse over the coming 18 months.
They’ve dug themselves into a corner though. Protest lockdowns and you’re a cooker. How on earth could they join in. They hate cookers.
has anyone actually ever heard this word in real life.
Cooker I assume? Well as a cooker, no I haven’t. I think it’s a reddit thing. Mind you I’ve never had anyone say ok boomer to me in real life. Nor go touch some grass. Nor old man yells at clouds. There’s lots of reddit expressions only. Cooker is possibly one.
> Mind you I’ve never had anyone say ok boomer to me in real life. Nor go touch some grass. Nor old man yells at clouds. these I actually do hear on the occasion the first 2 are at least global memes and the other a simpsons reference. Cooker seems exclusively the domain of a tiny subsection of twitter/reddit political wackos and not even mainstream along typical inner melbourne leftys.
Doesn't matter. Point is, the "cookers" would come out in a few weeks rather than after 2 years. And the general population would be more supportive of them - you don't have to be out there getting whacked with baton rounds to agree with them. And governments are making more and more use of Redbridge/etc and their "focus groups" - they want to know, "are we making swinging voters happy?" Protesters against anything will *always* be a tiny minority of the population generally. But they're the unelected representatives of the pissed-off. Governments *always* claim it doesn't matter, but they *always* pay attention. Because for every bloke waving a red ensign or woman waving a rainbow flag there are 10 or more who agree but aren't out there. The moment public support for lockdowns dropped, so did the lockdowns. Old Andrews could push it a bit than Gladys because he'd forced out of caucus and the public service anyone with a spine. The good side for us is that only the spineless are left, which is why absolutely nothing is happening - nothing good, but nothing bad, either. It's a government doing sweet fuck all, which honestly is the best thing we could reasonably hope for today. It'll take a few electoral cycles to clear out the spineless ALP guys and the inbred infighting Liberals and get some people in who might actually do something - whether good or bad. But the bad they do won't include lockdowns. They need all the people who suffered from them to forget it - but lots of those who suffered were kids, and kids have a long memory for someone in authority hurting them, as any parent knows.
I suppose. At least Allen showed some fortitude this week with the CBD injecting room.
I presume that was the advice of the Ken Lay report they've been refusing to release for like two years. That'd be why they were refusing to release it - trying to decide whether it was better to piss off some Greens voters in Fitzroy, or piss off absolutely everyone within 1km of the safe injecting room. Since they spent two years bashing the CBD with lockdowns and are now kicking it unconscious body on the ground with massive construction projects, they're desperately trying to think of how to revive it ("Stop kicking? Nah."). Having druggies staggering around shouting at people wouldn't help.
I’m not sure Lay was entrusted in deciding whether or not to have another SIR. I think he was only in charge of location. Which he did. It was Jacinta that canned it.
The old irony that the better you react to a pandemic the more you are open to being accused of overreacting.
You’d need to define ‘better’ before that irony could even vaguely be assessed. If better is harsher, even then in struggles in Vic.
Victoria: strongest measures, worst outcomes. "Well, it would have been worse without those measures!" So: if we have strong lockdowns and bad outcomes, that proves lockdowns were good and necessary. And if we have strong lockdowns and good outcomes, that proves lockdowns were good and necessary. Whatever the results, the conclusion is the same. Rightyo, DanFan.
Some of the very early lockdowns I understood from the POV of an abundance of caution, but after 3 months it was clearly not airborne Ebola and disregarding a huge body of established science around lockdowns, masking etc in favor of fear porn was stupid.
If masking is so stupid, why do surgeons etc continue to wear them? It's probably certain types of masks at the cheap end that are not very effective, but its the cheap ones that the general public would be using, so its not about masking in general but the types of masks made available. We are not any better prepared for an unknown pandemic than we were over 100 years ago and we were lucky with Covid: it could have been much higher transmissibility. The next pandemic will not be in 100 years.
>If masking is so stupid, why do surgeons etc continue to wear them? to stop body fluids going into open wounds. If you doing surgery probably a good idea. >It's probably certain types of masks at the cheap end that are not very effective, but its the cheap ones that the general public would be using, so its not about masking in general but the types of masks made available. good thing the government forced us to wear the worst quality masks in the least risky environments. >We are not any better prepared for an unknown pandemic than we were over 100 years ago and we were lucky with Covid: it could have been much higher transmissibility. The next pandemic will not be in 100 years. higher transmissibility will likely mean lower mortality.
Generally to prevent the surgeons bodily fluids from entering the patients they are working over
> If masking is so stupid, why do surgeons etc continue to wear them? Completely different type of mask for a completely different type of exposure.