The news headlines regarding New South Wales are growing increasingly bizarre, as bizarre in fact as the state premier’s statements.
This morning, as NSW admitted to another 1,116 new Covid-19 infections in the 24 hours to 8:00pm last night – and another four deaths – Premier Gladys Berejiklian said the state had done “very well”.
Gladys the Covid Queen
The official COVID-19 related death toll in NSW since she let the Delta variant loose on June 16 is now 100. As Matthew Reddin commented yesterday: “In her July 23 press conference, NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian labelled the 136 new cases of COVID-19 a ‘national emergency’. Today, August 30, NSW reported 1293 new cases. No reports were offered of links; no reports were offered of the success of contact tracers. It’s apparently no longer important data; no longer important enough to know where the disease is, where it’s going, its impact or how one case may or may not be linked to another. No talk of it being a national emergency, despite the case numbers having increased marginally shy of tenfold.”
Also yesterday, an anonymous doctor in a western Sydney hospital, writing in the Sydney Morning Herald, warned: “We believe it likely that projected patient numbers will soon be overwhelming…from Westmead to Liverpool and Blacktown, ambulances now routinely line up in hospital carparks, unable to discharge their patients. What exactly is going on?” Active COVID-19 cases have almost doubled in NSW in just 12 days and continue to multiply. The number of patients on ventilators has nearly doubled in the past week.
Read that last paragraph again!
Gladys B- the Covid Queen of Australia – insists it is “impossible” to eliminate the Delta variant of Covid-19 and refuses to even try, tipping not only NSW into crisis but potentially the entire nation. The World Health Organisation has classified four coronavirus variants “of concern”: the Alpha variant – first recorded in Kent, England, now in 193 countries; Beta in 141, Gamma in 91 and Delta in 170 countries, while the rising Mu variant in Columbia is the fifth and latest.
Slomo the Sly
The anonymous Sydney doctor – “an experienced respiratory doctor” – continues: “there has been no central coordination to implement COVID-safe wards by NSW Health. No guidelines, no standardisation to share COVID patients equitably across all of Sydney’s hospitals, and apparently no ministerial oversight.”
Obviously, Berejiklian and her government ministers are either unhinged or malign. Probably – like the (alleged) prime minister Scott Morrison – they are both.
Meanwhile, as someone commented in The Guardian Australia: “Still not enough vaccine available. Still no quarantine facilities. Still no Corona Virus support for Pensioners. And the worst case numbers we’ve ever seen in Australia. How has Snap Back Scotty resolved anything? And who is thriving in Australia, that isn’t a CEO or big business?”
Neighbouring Victoria recorded 120 cases and two deaths, and continues with premier Dan Andrews’ unequivocal hard “lockdown” with restrictions placed on movement and gatherings...
If only Ms B had done the same two and half months ago in NSW.
There is just one more federal parliamentary sitting left for the week and then Scott Morrison the prime minister (alleged) and his fellow crooks, creeps and crackpots skulk away for a six-week break.
The coronavirus pandemic does not take breaks.
