Given Dan Andrews' gold standard incompetence in contact tracing Melbourne has yet again been plunged into a hard lockdown.

https://www.theaustralian.com.au/inquirer/victorias-incompetence-could-not-be-more-stark/news-story/f718c83ecb87b939c977f02c539c7698

"Contact tracing is a perfect test of state capacity. It is time-sensitive, requires data sharing and cross-agency coordination, rapid training and substantial community trust and knowledge. Success means the avoidance of lockdowns: a telltale sign of state failure is shutting down businesses and severely restricting freedoms because you cannot prevent a disease outbreak.

Victoria’s contact tracing system used pens, paper and fax machines. It was too slow: contacts waited up to nearly two weeks to be notified about potential exposure. The tracing was operated centrally, in contrast to NSW or South Korea, which use decentralised local area health districts with expansive local knowledge. The result is striking: between June and October last year, only 3 per cent of NSW cases had an unknown origin, compared with 22 per cent in Victoria.

Hotel quarantine and contact tracing is just the tip of the iceberg of Victoria’s lacklustre governance. During a lockdown, for instance, Victoria required the manual printing and hand signing of forms for work travel permits.

By contrast, in NSW citizens could use Service NSW to apply for a digital border crossing permit. Officials worked overnight to ensure the system was in place in time. This was possible only because of a longer-term investment in state capacity by the NSW government. Service NSW was established in 2013 to improve customer service using modern technology. It brought together dispersed functions, thousands of phone numbers and hundreds of websites into a one-stop-shop accessible online, by phone or at more than 100 retail fronts. It was an entirely new agency whose leadership and frontline largely came from private sector customer service roles."

Obviously Hotel quarantine does not work when incompetent bureaucrats & governments are organising it. Perhaps it can't work at all as the buildings are not designed to isolate the air in each individual room.
Sure it is a great way of helping the hotels not go broke, but is it acceptable to the rest of the community.

It really is time to stop the incoming flights, until it is proven that we have a quarantine system that protects the community from infection. Surely it is better to have business & the community operating as normal, rather than bleed for those who chose to leave the country for any reason.

It only takes a quick glance at the UK, where incoming flights have continued to fuel their pandemic to see how dangerous incoming from overseas is to the general population.

Perhaps if we were to do a real test of the now many antivirals showing promise of successfully treating Covid 19 infections, we may be able to return to a normal world. If we can reduce it's kill rate to no more than average flu, sanity may return, if we can ween the ratbags like Dan Andrews off his love affair with controlling millions at the merest brain wave.

Well, average voters/citizens combined with incompetent Bureaudroids will invariably cause severe societal problems !

People who keep doing the same thing over and over, even though it doesn't work, are often described as being insane. The description certainly applies to Andrews. Cowardice is a good description for all members of his government who are letting him get away with it; and as for the opposition, well, WTF are they hiding.

2021 is looking to be worse than 2020, as some of us predicted. There is no end in sight for the China virus, and despite that, the usual suspects are champing at the bit to rev up the climate-change reign of terror, despite the fact that the climate is still refusing to bend to their will.

Now would be a good time to dump federalism and just have one bunch of pricks to deal with.

We should never stop talking about the lunacy inflicted on us, but it is looking more and more like a lost cause. We have been too complacent and lazy for too long. The return to feudalism did not have to be inevitable, but it sure as hell looks like it is now.

China virus
ttbn,
I'm more inclined to call it TJV (travel Junkies Virus) ! After all, without them it couldn't have spread.

ttbn says, "Now would be a good time to dump federalism and just have one bunch of pricks to deal with."

One would think that the Victorian situation clearly demonstrates the benefits of having multiple state governments that are individually responsible for their own territory.

We up here in Queensland have handled the virus quite well compared to Victoria. All we've had is a six week lock-down and one Brisbane wide 3 day lock-down. Indeed, all of the country besides Vic, (ie. WA, SA, Tas, Qld the territories and on a lesser scale NSW), has handled the virus better than just about anywhere in the whole world.

But ask yourself this: What would have happened if we had just one Government and by misfortune that government is as incompetent as the current Vic one?
Answer:the WHOLE COUNTRY would be stuffed not just one state.

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On a different track he also says: "The return to feudalism did not have to be inevitable, but it sure as hell looks like it is now."
Well obviously he has no idea what the historical implementation of "feudalism" was if he's referring to feudalism of the middle ages of Western Europe.