Please Sign the Petition to stop the COVID Lockdown Ending Prematurely

4 September 2021

The Governments, Federal and NSW State, seem hell bent on ending the COVID lockdown.

Morrison stuffed up the vaccine and Gladys stuffed up the lock-down.

Now Morrison is talking about ‘Freedom’ and ‘One Australia’ showing that patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel.  Gladys is talking about the need for more deaths as if it is an inevitable consequence of the Delta strain and that nothing can be done to mitigate the situation . She is talking about bed numbers and trying to conjure ICU nurses out of thin air.  The fact that the State public hospital system is always at full capacity with beds in corridors in ED is well known to any health professional who has any dealings with the system and is about to bite us big time.

So what should be done?  The lockdown can only buy time to improve the vaccine rollout, but this is still very much worth doing.  Figures from NSW that I posted last week suggested that vaccination reduced the chance of being in ICU by about 97%. Vaccinated people can still get and transmit COVID as it seems that the antibodies are not in secretions, so it is not until the virus invades that the body starts to fight it.  But as the disease is milder, vaccinated people will cough less, spread  the virus for less time and be less sick themselves.

NSW has given about 7.2 million doses to a population of 8.2 million people.  For everyone in NSW to have 2 doses it would take about 16 million doses.  If we assume that about 4% of people are anti-vaxxers and want to take their chances, and 16% are children under 12 for whom the vaccines are not approved,  then 80% of the total population should be vaccinated, which will take about 13 million doses.  At the current rate of a million doses a week, that should take about 6 weeks from now.

The government already has a huge debt and will avoid a lot of future costs by prevention rather than ‘cure’.  A support package for those who cannot work is naturally needed also. There was a full page ad in the SMH last week with a number of businesses urging the Government to stick to the opening up timetable of the Doherty Report.  Given that the Doherty Report recommendations were based on a far lower number of cases and it was assumed that what cases there were could be traced and were not Delta variants, the report needs to be reconsidered. Perhaps because it is from a reputable research organisation and that it is a long read it has not been seriously challenged, The Government has used it to try to justify the early opening.

One of the disappointing things in my life has been the revelation that some people really do not care a fig about anyone as long as they are personally OK.  I was initially shocked to find that the Tobacco industry really did not care how many people died as long as they could make money.  I found that the asbestos industry was the same, and then that most businesses skimp on safety on the principle that ‘we take the money, you take the risk’  There has also been the worrying trend, which I still link to Harvard management theory  in the 1980s that managers can manage anything, and just need to buy any expertise that they do not have.  Often that do not even know what they do not know, so they neglect to ask, do not know who or what to ask, or find the advice inconvenient.    And sometimes they put ads in the paper.

We also cannot assume that those in Government know or care or that their primary concern will be for the welfare of their constituents.  Presumably their unlikely re-election is what they are focused on.

So please sign the petition to stop the early opening- it currently all we can do.