It’s final: if you use the military to lock people in their houses for months and months, they won’t get the flu.
Especially in the summer.
A lockdown of Australia’s second-biggest city will be eased after the country’s coronavirus epicentre said it had gone 24 hours without any new infections for the first time in four months, Victoria state Premier Daniel Andrews said on Monday.
Melbourne – home to 5 million people – has been in lockdown since early July after a spike of novel coronavirus infections that began in hotels where people were in quarantine after arriving from abroad.
But with infections now under control, Andrews said most restrictions would be eased in two phases from Tuesday, which should give Australia’s ailing economy a boost.
“Now is the time to open up,” Andrews told reporters in Melbourne.
“We’ve have been able to bring this under control, a day of zero cases is an amazing achievement.”
Andrews said people would be free to leave their homes from Tuesday while restaurants, cafes, shops, bars and hotels would be allowed to reopen.
Capacities at those businesses, however, will be capped at 40 indoors and 70 outside.
The size of religious services would also be expanded, Andrews said.
Andrews said people would be allowed to travel from Melbourne to the state’s rural areas from Nov. 9, when a curb limiting people to no more than 25 km (15.5 miles) from their homes will be dropped.
The easing of restrictions will boost hopes of a quick economic rebound from Australia’s first recession in three decades, triggered after large swathes the economy were shut to slow the spread of the virus.
The economy shrank 7% in the three months to the end of June, the biggest quarterly contraction since records began in 1959. Unemployment hit a 22-year high of 7.5% in July as businesses and borders closed.
Australia, like every other Western country, is lying in an outrageous way about the damage they’ve done to their economy. Their government, like the US government, is bailing out businesses and kicking this collapse down the road.
You can’t kick it forever, but the idea is that you kick it enough that you’re able to slowly ease people into poverty, while also telling them that things are actually getting better somehow.
The idea that things are ever going back to the way they were is simply absurd, and anyone who tells you that is treating you like a child. Businesses have been destroyed and massive amounts of wealth have been sucked out of society. The wealth has been taken by an elite that isn’t going to give it back.
People should expect to live lives of about half the quality of the lives they lived before the lockdowns. If it’s anything better than that, they can be pleasantly surprised. It’s unlikely it will be, however.
Furthermore: the virus isn’t “beaten,” and it will just start spreading again, if they keep doing testing. There is no way to remove this virus from the life of the humans, and all these lockdowns do is prevent immunities. So if Victoria really is opening back up, it means it is going to start spreading again, and by their own rules, that means they will have to shut down again.
So this “opening” is basically just intended to traumatize people even more.