It’s like watching the start of just about every zombie apocalypse movie: a montage of ever-more-urgent news reports, graphics of growing numbers of infected, footage of lines of cars fleeing the city.
Except that the zombies in this case are very real: they’re the politicians and health bureaucrats who couldn’t organise a chook raffle and keep doing the same stupid things, hoping for different results. They’re also the zombies who voted for the Zombie Party and endlessly flooded social media with assertions that #IStandWithZombie.
So let’s cut to the disaster montage:
The Victorian government will announce the state’s fourth coronavirus lockdown this morning, after up to 10 new cases were confirmed overnight, bringing the cluster total to up to 25.
Cabinet met late into Wednesday night, with further meetings being held early on Thursday to determine the length and nature of the lockdown, which is likely to last at least seven days.
More than 70 exposure sites have now been confirmed, with nine new locations listed overnight, from Red Hill on the Mornington Peninsula to Cohuna near the NSW border and all over Melbourne.
Like any decent zombie movie, what we’re looking at right now are the first few strangely stilted figures shuffling down the street and moaning about brains. It’s worryingly likely that pretty soon the whole army of the undead will be unleashed.
No decent disaster movie is complete without its villainously clueless politician.
Premier Daniel Andrews cited the “light speed” at which the UK strain was moving in February when he announced the state’s last lockdown, which lasted for five days.
The Australian
Here’s were we get to the opening action scenes: the lines of cars fleeing the city in panic.
Residents report fleeing Melbourne on Thursday morning with fears the city is about to go into its fourth lockdown since the Covid-19 pandemic began[…]
Callers to 3AW on Thursday morning said they were hitting the road to get out of the state as the city braces for a possible lockdown.
“I’m heading off to Sydney now, in the car,” one caller said. “I’m going straight right through, no stops. I just want to get to Sydney.
“Yesterday morning I left Melbourne at 3 o’clock – there were so many cars loaded, getting to Sydney,” a second said[…]
A poll asking if listeners believed the state was about to go into lockdown returned an overwhelming “yes” result.
The Australian
Again, just like your standard zombie/disaster movie, the warning signs were there and ignored all along.
From the very beginning of the Wuhan pandemic, the Victorian government has been even more hopelessly incompetent than most. It was Victoria’s hotel quarantine scheme that led directly to it – even before this latest outbreak – recording twice the number of infections and nine times the number of deaths from the rest of Australia combined. Yet, like governments around the world, they’ve persisted with hotel quarantine.
We also know that lockdowns just do not work. Yet here they go again.
But it looks like fourth time is not the charm for Victorians who’ve kept reassuring us that they “#StandWithDan”. Even as they were confined under military curfew for the first time in Melbourne’s history.
This time, it seems, the hashtag is #IFleeFromDan.
I’m sure the other states will be just so grateful.
Please share this article so that others can discover The BFD
