The Saturday Paper has finally produced a piece of journalism worthy of the name with leaked material from the National Cabinet that is damning of the preparations made by Mad Gladys and Psycho Scott for reopening:
On Friday, Scott Morrison’s national cabinet met with state and territory leaders to discuss a new paper that details emerging and significant pressure on the country’s healthcare workforce. It is understood the report covers staff surging arrangements, intensive care capacity and the possibility of shifting resources between states.
In New South Wales, which recorded 1029 new local coronavirus cases on Thursday, Westmead Hospital issued an “internal disaster management” protocol this week as it reached capacity for Covid-19 patients.
The hospital reduced ambulance arrivals and transferred critical patients to other sites. A memo said it was “conducting urgent reviews with clinicians around critical care capacity, emergency department flow, Covid-19 wards, ambulance offloading and our Covid patient journey”.
Acting general manager Jenelle Matic said the facility’s management was also “working with our private hospital network to open up to 100 beds”.
Shortly after Westmead established its emergency operations centre, Blacktown Hospital stopped accepting Covid-19 patients.
In mid-August, The Saturday Paper has learnt, another Sydney hospital, St George Hospital, also in a local government area of concern, was forced to “furlough” 90 staff for two weeks of isolation following exposure to the highly contagious Delta strain of the virus.
In Victoria, more than 450 healthcare workers attached to Royal Melbourne Hospital were sent into quarantine last weekend. On Thursday, the state recorded 80 new Covid-19 cases; its worst single day since the tail end of the second wave.
A NSW Health spokesperson told The Saturday Paper “support from private hospital staff will be required to support the large-scale vaccination effort currently underway and workforce demands in the NSW public health system”.
They said: “Staff from many private hospitals across Sydney are already being deployed to assist the NSW government’s response to the Covid-19 outbreak, including intensive care demands.”
The health workforce “furlough” crisis in Victoria and NSW alone is now seven times worse than the national situation on August 10, according to data contained in a briefing to national cabinet. It highlights another issue of vulnerability: although states have substantially increased their supply of ventilators since the first outbreak of Covid-19, they do not have the healthcare staff to operate them, and the staff they do have are vulnerable to exposure and the need to quarantine.
Using figures from the same national cabinet analysis, obtained by The Saturday Paper, the 116 patients in NSW intensive care units on Thursday represented almost 14 per cent of the entire state’s currently staffed and open 863 ICU beds. Including people in ICU for reasons other than Covid-19 complications, the system is at 60 per cent capacity.
Victoria has half that number of ICU beds and half the expansion capacity. This week, the state announced it would fly in 350 medical staff – mostly doctors and specialist nurses – from overseas to relieve pressure on a system that has already borne the brunt of the pandemic in Australia. Since the pandemic began, more than 2100 exemptions have been issued for approved healthcare workers travelling to Australia.
The Saturday Paper can reveal that although the NSW government is physically capable of expanding its intensive care capacity to 2015 beds and ventilators, a document prepared for national cabinet shows it has just a fraction of the staff available to run them. The paper says that “additional nursing staff resources available for bedside ICU care” is just 328. In practice, this is enough staff to add only about 164 extra ICU beds.
Similarly, Victoria had 125 additional staff available for its intensive care capacity. These numbers are able to be increased, but not without significant intervention elsewhere in the hospital system.
National cabinet has been told the country could expand its intensive care beds by 944 places – but at best it has the staff to operate 346 of these.
In the densely populated south-west and Western Sydney regions, where 80 per cent of all cases from the Delta outbreak are located, the clinical chokepoints are even more pronounced.
Surely we can just put medical staff on the skills shortages list.
Mad Gladys appears blissfully unaware of the trap she has set herself:
“The case numbers are always concerning when they are going up, and we would love to see them go back down, but that is not the most relevant number for us,” Ms Berejiklian said.
“The most relevant number for NSW is how many people are vaccinated and how many people are we keeping out of hospital and out of intensive care and that is what is really important for us to move forward.”
Only if you can cope with the numbers. To wit:
Desperate intensive care nurses in Sydney are reportedly “knocking out” their patients with sedatives so they can handle the increasing number of patients ending up in ICU, according to a concerning new report.
It comes as the city’s health system is being put under strain from skyrocketing Covid cases.
On Sunday, there were 813 Covid patients in hospitals across NSW, 35 more than Saturday and 256 more than the previous Sunday. There are now 126 people in intensive care, with 54 on ventilators.
Two ICU nurses from Sydney’s Royal Prince Alfred and St Vincent’s hospitals told The Guardian that their facilities are under immense pressure with the rising caseload and diminishing staff numbers.
They said that increasing sedative dosage is the safest way they can manage their patient load.
Meanwhile, Mad Gladys has worked out Psycho Scott:
Yet even between the two Sydneysiders, relations are strained. Berejiklian is a Liberal team player who keeps her grievances about Morrison private. But, in private, she is scathing. The NSW Premier has told Liberal colleagues she’d have preferred that Peter Dutton had won the last federal leadership ballot – she’d rather be dealing with Dutton because Morrison is so unpleasant, she’s said. She’s described the PM as a “bully”.
Berejiklian went so far as to tell a colleague that Morrison’s behaviour was “evil”. She and many of her colleagues are still angry at the fact that Morrison’s press office phoned political reporters in a background effort to discredit her, so-called “briefing against her”, over the vaccine rollout a few weeks ago. They accuse Morrison’s staff of doing the same during the bushfires of two years ago: “Usually he briefs against her for doing her job with some measure of competence,” said one of the Premier’s loyalists. “He doesn’t like the contrast – he makes himself look big by trying to make others look small.”
Among Berejiklian’s inner circle, it’s considered a joke to call Morrison “the Prime Minister for NSW”. They consider Morrison to be the Prime Minister for Morrison and no one else.
Takes one to know one. Given her failure to lock down properly to kill Delta, Mad Gladys appears to have deliberately seeded the virus into NSW, perhaps out of ideology or political pride. Actions speak louder than words and she’s as nuts and “evil” as Psycho Scott in my book.
You can add Josh Frydenberg to the list of dangerous fruitcakes:
Treasurer Josh Frydenberg has warned state premiers the economy will suffer if they don’t stick to the national plan to reopen once adult vaccination rates reach 70 and 80 per cent.
In a coded message to the resources states of Queensland and Western Australia – both of which have doggedly pursued zero-COVID policies, kept their borders closed and are lagging the rest of the country in vaccination rates – Mr Frydenberg also warned of a “ridiculous” scenario under which it might be possible for many Australians to fly to Singapore or Canada, but not Perth or Cairns.
WA and QLD aren’t in recession, Josh. They’re open and enjoying normal life, thanks very much. NSW and VIC are in effective depression as they wrestle with Delta without enough Frydenberg support:
Should Delta-free states also volunteer to enter Delta depression at the behest of a gaslighting and parsimonious Frydenberg? There are not many responses I can think of that can be uttered in polite conversation.
Keeping the borders shut tight and learning from the psychos reopening mistakes is clearly the sensible approach. Not least because it will give Delta-free states time to figure what to do about vaccinations and children, while a barren Berejiklian throws them into the Delta mincer on October 25 (except in her Liberal electorates of the eastern suburbs).
Dictator Dan is still going that way:
Premier Daniel Andrews has been forced to extend Victoria’s lockdown because of higher COVID-19 case numbers but he insists it is still possible to get to “very low” numbers.
Mr Andrews confirmed case numbers remained too high to lift lockdown as planned on Thursday, and said more information about ongoing restrictions would be announced in the week ahead.
Above it all, Psycho Scott is as destructively useless as ever. Having caused all of it by trashing the vaccine procurement and rollout, not to mention abjectly failing to centralise hotel quarantine, his government is hospitalised and intubated in intensive care:
The Prime Minister for Morrison is on his death bed. We can be thankful for small mercies.
