Australians underestimate this lunatic covid circus at our peril | The Wentworth Report

https://wentworthreport.com/2021/12/26/australians-underestimate-this-lunatic-covid-circus-at-our-peril/

Australians underestimate this lunatic covid circus at our peril. By Steve Waterson.

Have we completely abandoned logic in this country? If not, will someone help me understand why, after spending billions of dollars and causing extreme inconvenience to literally every person in Australia with convoluted compliance regulations and brutal, state-sanctioned coercion, our Covid vaccination program has failed to deliver us the benefits we were promised?

Vaccines should have been sufficient to calm our fears. That’s why we were assured that once we hit fantastic, world-beating levels of vaccination, our stolen freedoms would be restored. Yet here we are, with hundreds of thousands of Australians queuing for hours to comply with the nonsensical strictures of that clown car of idiots who can’t grasp the concept of “living with Covid” they so enthusiastically espoused just moments ago.

If not tolerance of a growth in infections, what does that gormless platitude mean?

After more than 50 million tests (99.5 per cent of them negative) at a cost of $10bn [$200 each], we seem as terrified as when the pandemic sky started falling in almost two years ago.

This time it’s different, though. Most people, I suspect, are not frightened of contracting the virus but of ending up in an airport motel with a couple of kids determined to kill each other and an angry partner who “said all along that going to visit your stupid parents was a mistake”, because one of the party failed a mandatory PCR examination. …

I have had calls from soon-to-be-former friends informing me they had seen someone a couple of weeks ago who later discovered they had the virus (asymptomatic, of course), presumably making me a casual contact twice removed (I’m not entirely au fait with the genealogy).

The preposterous rules (sit near an asymptomatic infected person for 14 minutes and it’s casual; a minute more and it’s close: this virus floats through the air at a very leisurely pace) have caused people to swap the queues at David Jones for the much longer ones at testing stations, which, remarkably, were not prepared for the totally predictable sudden rush. …

The World Health Organisation’s Tedros Babyjesus, or whatever he’s called, joins the pollies to urge caution in its usual abundance: “Surely we have learned by now that we underestimate this virus at our peril,” he warned a WHO media briefing last week.

Really? Underestimate, you say? We’ve just fined a Sydney teenager $12,500 for not wearing a mask in a Byron Bay taxi. There are men still in prison for sneaking into the AFL grand final. I defy Teddy to name anyone in authority who has done anything but wet themselves in cartwheels of panicked over-reaction. …

Oh the masks:

I won’t question masks’ efficacy, save to quote Colin Axon, a scientist who advises the British government’s SAGE committee on airborne transmission of the virus. He calls them “comfort blankets”, explaining that medical experts, with their “cartoonish” view of how particles travel, are “unable to comprehend” just how minuscule the virus is. “A Covid particle is roughly 100 nanometres,” he says.

“Material gaps in blue surgical masks”, although invisible to the naked eye, “are up to 1000 times that size; cloth-mask gaps can be 500,000 times that size”.

Aerosols in the wearer’s breath “escape masks and render them ineffective”, he adds, likening virus particles’ passage through the material to firing marbles at builders’ scaffolding: “Some might hit a pole and rebound, but most will fly through.” But if it makes you feel secure, please keep pulling the grubby rags out of your pocket and popping them on as you head into Woolies.

It was so much easier when we just shut the borders and had no covid. But our dopey politicians, having bought time to see what the rest of the world did and what worked, then made a bad error: they chose the vaccination path. The anti-viral path was so much better.

But our bureaucrats and media are determined not to let Australians even know that option exists. With the rest of the west we have locked ourselves into a failing and expensive “solution”, that’s become too big too fail.

UPDATE: Testing clinics ‘in meltdown’ amid record cases. By Joseph Lam.

A Sydney mayor says he has heard reports of testing clinics being “in meltdown” in his area as wait times blew out in some parts of the state amid a record day of infections.

One person, who is a state parliament employee and was seeking testing as a close contact, was standing in line at Prince of Wales Hospital in Randwick.

They said they saw dozens of people appearing to be turned away amid overwhelming demand, while others queued for more than five hours before being tested. …

Randwick Mayor Dylan Parker said he had heard reports that local testing was in “meltdown”.

“Hundreds of people waiting in line for several hours with multiple drive-throughs shut,” he posted on Facebook.

“Reportedly now Prince of Wales hospital is no longer accepting walk-ins as the line is too long. This mess was totally foreseeable.”