Mad Gladys and Psycho Scott must resign

COVID apartheid is tearing Australia apart. Some are depressed:

Australians are more worried about job losses and their mental health than they are about a large breakout of Covid-19 cases and deaths, according to a landmark survey that reveals sharply changing attitudes to lockdowns and the pandemic.

The poll also finds strong support for keeping schools open ­during lockdowns amid growing fears that children in Victoria and NSW are suffering long-term harm to their education.

The survey, by YouGov, conducted exclusively for News Corp Australia between August 20 to 25, found that two in three Australians believe vaccinations are the pathway back to normal life, with just 22 per cent believing that lockdowns must continue until Covid cases reach zero.

Others agree with lockdowns and vaccinating children:

Australians are concerned about any “living with Covid” strategy that would lead to a significant increase in hospitalisations and deaths – and a majority in the latest Guardian Essential poll think governments should not end current lockdowns until a substantial proportion of children are fully vaccinated.

Amid sustained political, epidemiological and community debate about Australia’s four-phase reopening strategy, the latest Guardian Essential survey of 1,100 respondents finds only 12% of the sample would be comfortable with any transition that increases deaths and hospitalisations.

Then there are ongoing ICU questions. Mad Gladys has plenty of ventilators but not enough staff. Hospital and ICU stress is going to explode when cases double, let alone rise by 5x or 10x:

The union representing health workers says the NSW Premier is “talking a big game” if she thinks the state’s hospital system can withstand an expected increase in COVID-19 cases over the coming weeks.

As Premier Gladys Berejiklian announced yet another record day of case numbers on Monday, she warned October would be the state’s “worst month” with an expected increase in admissions to intensive care.

Ms Berejiklian continues to push for the state to begin opening up when 80 per cent of adults are fully vaccinated.

At 80% we should be opening up. The problem is Mad Gladys has let it out long before we got there risking everybody for her pride.

The political failures are extreme at every level:

Western Australia is the most vulnerable state to a COVID-19 outbreak with data presented to national cabinet showing an infection could spread at almost three times the rate as that in NSW, due to WA’s low rate of vaccination and lack of social distancing.

…While Premier Mark McGowan, whose state has the lowest vaccination rate in the country with about 49 per cent of adults having had their first shot, is renowned for locking down hard and fast, by the time the first case was detected, the virus could have taken hold.

…There were more heated clashes between Mr McGowan and the Morrison government on Monday as the latter continued to advocate for the national plan.

Mr Morrison sought to calm Mr McGowan and others such as Queensland Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk, who say they are being pressured to introduce death and disease into their states just because other states have lost control.

Amen to that, but you can’t lag in vaccines or you’re just as bad. WA should introduce massive carrot and stick incentives.

Whether you agree with immediate reopening or delayed, we all need to be rid of the psychopaths that got us here and who are now gaslighting everybody to make political hay out of dead bodies. Psycho Scott trashed the vaccine rollout and never centralised quarantine and Mad Gladys unleashed the virus to save face. What a pair of @#$%s.

To wit, Bernard Keane at Crikey is 100% right:

Gladys Berejiklian has consistently refused to be held accountable for her crucial errors in managing what should have been a minor risk of quarantine breach but which has led to tens of thousands of infections (a record 1290 today), scores of deaths, a hospital system nearing crisis point and a horrific threat to NSW Indigenous communities left behind in the vaccine strollout.

Although she refuses to acknowledge it, her business-friendly approach to managing outbreaks compounded the initial failure of regulation around safe transport of aircrews, which provided the seed for the current outbreak. Her reluctance to place Sydney in lockdown, and the mild lockdown she imposed when she did, not merely added to the current NSW crisis but to seeding the outbreaks in Victoria, the ACT and New Zealand, and what is increasingly looking like a return to recession for Australia.

By normal political standards, even the debased standards that characterise modern politics, that should be more than enough to resign over.

But Berejiklian’s management of the pandemic has delivered NSW into the worst of both worlds. It remains locked down, with businesses crippled, workers left idle, Australia’s largest economy frozen, its citizens prevented from travelling, enduring draconian restrictions on their lives, and prevented from participating in the most basic rituals of everyday life.

At the same time, NSW “lives with COVID”. Case numbers have topped 1000 a day. Ignore the case numbers, Berejiklian says, and focus on vaccinations. But the NSW hospital system is showing signs of severe strain. In the past seven days, hospitalisations from COVID have increased 46%. Patients in ICU have increased 34% in a week. If this is “living with COVID”, the Berejiklian government offers a salutary lesson for business and anti-lockdown spruikers: the impact on the health system is colossal.

Moreover, Berejiklian can offer no end in sight. She is anxious to end lockdowns, but that will only send a much bigger surge of COVID patients into hospital and into ICU — the majority of them unvaccinated, many older but vaccinated people, and younger people too.

Having created this outbreak through her own misjudgments, Berejiklian has mismanaged it as well, inflicting outbreaks on other states and countries, and leaving her state in a limbo of living with COVID while being locked down.

Psycho Scott should go back to Hawaii, permanently.