Coronavirus (COVID-19) Pandemic

[stui magpie]

^

Basically if you have a job, you're employer is open and requires you to do your job and you can't do it from home, you're an essential worker for this purpose.

I predict there's going to be some angst and backlash against those groups that will be perceived to have caused this, particularly from retail and hospitality small business.

[K]

[Jezza]

Victoria

Confirmed Cases:
- 1). Hume = 276
- 2). Brimbank = 186
- 3). Melbourne = 185
- 4). Wyndham = 171
- 5). Moreland = 136
- 6). Casey = 125
- 7). Moonee Valley = 120
- 8]. Stonnington = 106
- 9). Banyule = 104
- 10). Whittlesea = 89

Active Cases:
- 1). Hume = 145
- 2). Wyndham = 105
- 3). Melbourne = 97
- 4). Brimbank = 77
- 5). Moonee Valley = 50
- 6). Moreland = 38
- 7). Whittlesea = 36
- 8]. Maribyrnong = 21
- 9). Casey = 20
- 10). Melton = 20

[Sicks Bux]

A Statement from the Australian Services Union:

Statement on Public Housing lockdown

Community sector workers hold a wealth of expertise supporting and working with those most vulnerable in our communities. They are social and community workers with expertise in mental health, family violence, alcohol and other drug, aged care, migrant and refugee, children’s support and more. This meeting of ASU members condemns the law and order response put in place at the North Melbourne and Flemington high rises, versus a health and social services response.

The experience of community sector workers is that a police presence hinders rather than helps effective community work responses, creating fear, distrust and a barrier to seeking support and services. A hard job is made even harder for ASU members doing their job when clients don’t trust police.

They are less likely to engage and it should be professional and skilled community workers, in conjunction with nurses and infection control workers who are already working in these communities that continue to do so.


This meeting of ASU members demands:
1. No to racism, and yes to a culturally sensitive healthcare response, not a policing response
2. Free hand sanitizer, PPE and supplies to all public housing with communal facilities and amenities
3. Police off the estates – lockdowns are a health issue not a criminal issue
4. Support for residents to be in stage four lockdown instead of a hard lockdown
5. Mass testing with test results returned in 24 hrs
6. Job guarantees and paid Covid-19 leave for all residents
7. Extend the rent-freeze for public housing residents
8. State government guarantee to improve and expand current public housing stock
9. Improved maintenance of amenities and facilities (ie lifts, laundry facilities etc)
10. Improved cleanliness of shared facilities and amenities at the flats including ongoing deep cleaning in line with
sanitising to prevent spread of virus. (ie laundry, lift, rubbish chutes, stairwells)
11. Improved consultation to occur with the ASU, community leaders and professionals – before change happens
12. Accessible messages through: community languages, age appropriate for children, translators, wifi, mobiles etc
13. The right person providing the right services (not volunteers, professional staff to be trained and briefed)
14. Condemnation of the punitive response of putting hundreds of police in the flats with no warning. ASU members
report this to be extremely re-traumatising and inappropriate considering some instances of proven police violence
with the communities living there.
15. Urgent provision of supplies for alcohol and other drug withdrawal, and provision of pharmacotherapy supports
16. Appropriate family violence perpetrator intervention – integrated with risk assessments by Family Violence
professionals.
17. Solidarity and support with residents current demands, and acknowledge the extremely negative impact of policing -who are often perpetrators of violence.

[watt price tully]

^ what a load of backslapping sanctimonious codswallop FFS 🙄

This is not an either or situation. Health and Mental Health, Centrelink, social welfare, drug and alcohol are in place as is food but you need the police front and square all the time and it would be stupid and naive to do it without police.

A health response and not a police response: spare me.

There was no time to wait till a committee is voted on and the allied health staff decide what time to have their morning tea break 🙄

[K]

The U.S. Is Repeating Its Deadliest Pandemic Mistake
More than 40 percent of all coronavirus deaths in America have been in nursing homes. ...

https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2020/07/us-repeating-deadliest-pandemic-mistake-nursing-home-deaths/613855/

"Nursing-home covid-19 deaths may seem inevitable, given that their elderly residents live cooped up together. But according to interviews with nearly a dozen nursing-home experts, it didn’t have to be this way. Worldwide, entire cities and individual nursing homes have remained coronavirus-free.

Take Hong Kong, population 7.5 million, which has reported no deaths from COVID-19 in its care homes. The city was scarred by the outbreak of severe acute respiratory syndrome, or SARS, in 2003, during which it suffered nearly 300 deaths, or almost 40 percent of the global death toll. Nursing-home residents were more likely than the general public to get SARS, and 78 percent of residents who got the virus died from it, according to Terry Lum, the head of the department of social work and social administration at the University of Hong Kong. “We also had a few doctors and nurses get killed by SARS,” Lum told me. “Those are painful to watch. We didn’t want to see that ever again.”

Immediately after the 2003 outbreak, the Hong Kong government launched a revamped policy of infectious-disease control that required nursing homes to have a designated, government-trained infection-control officer, according to Lum. All nursing homes had to maintain at least a month’s supply of face masks and other PPE.

As soon as COVID-19 broke out in Hong Kong, in January of this year, its nursing homes halted nonurgent hospital trips among residents as well as family visitation, Lum said. Nursing-home staffers donned masks as they cared for the residents. Any nursing-home residents who caught COVID-19 were isolated in hospital coronavirus wards—not in nursing homes—until they had tested negative for the virus at least twice.

There was a human cost to the lack of family visits, Lum told me; patients who had dementia deteriorated more quickly without social interaction. But nursing-home administrators were certain that if even one COVID-19 case snuck into a nursing home, it would spark a conflagration with tragic results."

[stui magpie]

[think positive]

[think positive]

[K]

[Morrigu]

[eddiesmith]

[watt price tully]

My oldest in Sydney (she left Vic over 2 months ago) tells me that one of the Victorian store workers of Middle Eastern background) got engaged and had 200 f*cking guests a few weeks ago.

Hello, spaceship to planet earth. Just appalling. Could be Christian could be Muslim, but FFS all 200 and the couple need to be jailed pronto.

[Morrigu]

[stui magpie]