Living the pandemic ' new normal' in New South Wales January 2022

Want to know why in New South Wales chaos is the 'new normal'?

COVID-19 published data finally confirmed a truth - by week ending 9 January 2022 only 78.3% of total NSW population was fully vaccinated. Note: it’s possible that government was using June 2019 or 2020 population totals which would result in a lower fully vaccinated percentage total.

What this means is when Dominic Perrottet became premier in early October 2021 the real vaccination rate of the total state population (ABS pop. 30 June 2021) was under 55% & by 25 November 2021 it was still not the loudly boasted about 80% total. Even with est. 42% of the population aged 12 to 90 years of age & over being fully vaccinated.  And he knew those vaccination rates were misleading as he had been a member of NSW crisis cabinet since its creation.

Yet knowing all this Perrottet still kept Morrison & Berejiklian’s insane 'living with COVID’ push alive by further reducing public health protections in the face of a new Omicron Variant Outbreak combining with an existing Delta Variant Outbreak. 

The NSW Premier and MLA for Epping intentionally opened up vulnerable villages, towns & cities in 128 local government areas and communities them to fend for themselves.

The rest is history. Because ‘opening up’ the state with a real full vaccination rate well under the promised 70-80% (a percentage range much of the expert advice to government was based on) and, with the bare minimum of a test, trace, contact & isolate public health structure in place, the combined Delta-Omicron infection growth began to surge and is on its way to being an epidemiological tsunami which will toss New South Wales this way and that for at least the next six weeks, perhaps longer.

This because, despite the fact that full vaccination of those 12 to 90 years of age & older has now reached est. 86.1%, a significant number of those vaccinated since 22 February 2021 no longer have a high level of protection against the virus. 

By the week ending 9 January 2022, 68.9% of all COVID-19 cases hospitalized across the state were patients who had been fully vaccinated sometime in the last 22 months and, as of 15 January only 25.4% of all fully vaccinated NSW residents have received a vaccine booster injection to increase waning immunity levels.

Even reinstating a weak mishmash of previous public health restrictions is not going to change what is happening now that the virus has reached the status of uncontrolled.

The exact number of daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly and annual COVID-19 cases which have occurred in the New South Wales resident population can no longer be reliably quantified. The 'let it rip'  mentality of the Australian and NSW Coalition Governments had overseen the disintegration of a public health response to SARS-CoV-2 the virus and COVID-19 the infectious disease it caused.  A situation which was laid bare by December 2021 when it became impossible to test or count every person in the state who was displaying/fallen ill with COVID-19 symptoms.

There were at total of 23,456 new confirmed COVID-19 cases reported by NSW Health to 8pm Saturday 15 January 2022, with the deaths of 20 people of whom 14 people were vaccinated against COVID-19 and six people were not vaccinated.

NOTE: The aforementioned total new cases includes both positive PCR and RAT results, but excludes those 11, 204 positive RAT results included in 15 January figures which actually occurred in the last 7 days. It seems that the difficulty in sourcing a RAT has resulted in only est. 2,478 COVID-19 positive home being reported within the last 24 hours to 8pm 15 January.

Currently there are 2,650 COVID-19 cases admitted to hospital, including 191 people in intensive care, 61 of whom require ventilation.

As of 8pm 15 January there are 342,838 active COVID-19 cases in the state - less than 1% of these people would currently be in hospital and the remainder are understood to be self-managing their illness outside of a hospital setting either in the home or insecure accommodation.

Currently NSW Health is recording the incidence of COVID-19 diagnostic testing in the last four weeks up to 15 January as 125 PCR tests done per 1,000 head of population. Since 26 November 2021 a large proportion of all positive PCR tests have not had genomic sequencing.

According to NSW Health of the 20,978 new cases confirmed by PCR testing as at 8pm on Saturday 15 January 2022: 4,063 are from South Western Sydney Local Health District (LHD), 3,139 are from Western Sydney LHD, 2,336 are from South Eastern Sydney LHD, 1,875 are from Northern Sydney LHD, 1,858 are from Sydney LHD, 1,755 are from Hunter New England LHD, 1,458 are from Illawarra Shoalhaven LHD, 989 are from Nepean Blue Mountains LHD, 686 are from Northern NSW LHD, 610 are from Central Coast LHD, 571 are from Murrumbidgee LHD, 489 are from Southern NSW LHD, 439 are from Western NSW LHD, 257 are from Mid North Coast LHD, 67 are from Far West LHD, 2 are in correctional settings, and 384 are yet to be assigned to an LHD.

To 8pm 15 January, 686 COVID-19 cases confirmed by PCR testing were recorded across 7 local government areas in Northern NSW Local Health District:

Tweed Shire – 353 cases

Byron Shire – 126 cases

Ballina Shire – 84 cases

Lismore City – 49 cases

Clarence Valley – 33 cases

Richmond Valley – 28 cases

Kyogle Shire – 13 cases

TOTAL 686

NOTE: NSW Location database is only updated 5 days out of every seven so postcodes for 15 January not yet available at time of posting.

Currently there are 52 COVID-19 positive patients in hospital in Northern NSW, with 8 of these in ICU.

IMAGE: found on Twitter

The Weekend Australian reported on 16 January 2022:

“It is as we feared,” Dr Chris Ingall, from the hospital’s medical staff council, told the publication.

“We are seeing an almost exclusively unvaccinated population in the hospital and exclusively unvaccinated in the intensive care ward at this point.

“We predicted this, we said there would be a tsunami here, everyone predicted it would sweep through the pockets of the unvaccinated.”…..

One of the people in ICU is Mullimbimby-based tarot card reader and reiki master Helen Dean who had previously protested against vaccine mandates.

She caught the virus last month and has been on a ventilator since Christmas Day…...

The Daily Telegraph reported she was taken off life support on Saturday but remains in ICU…..

Meanwhile, NSW Health data has revealed the impact anti-vaxxers are causing on the health system.

Of NSW’s Covid deaths, 420 were unvaccinated while just 96 had the jab.

The Daily Telegraph also estimated the cost of ICU per patient per day is about $4375.

SOURCES

• https://www.health.nsw.gov.au/news/Pages/2022-nsw-health.aspx
• https://aci.health.nsw.gov.au/covid-19/critical-intelligence-unit/dashboard
• https://nnswlhd.health.nsw.gov.au/blog/category/media-releases/
• https://www.health.gov.au/sites/default/files/documents/2021/10/covid-19-vaccine-rollout-update-6-october-2021.pdf
• https://www.abs.gov.au/statistics/people/population/national-state-and-territory-population/latest-release
• https://twitter.com/NSWHealth
• https://apps.who.int/iris/bitstream/handle/10665/332073/WHO-2019-nCoV-Adjusting_PH_measures-Criteria-2020.1-eng.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y

Morrison Government enters into multiple emergency procurement contracts for the supply of rapid antigen tests then acts surprised when its demands crowd out existing non-government customers

On 11 January 2022 AUSTENDER published five contract notices for the procurement of Rapid Antigen Tests by the Australian Dept. of Health with a combined value of $61.82 million.

All contacts began on 10 January 2022 and all end in January or early February 2022 and, these contracts are with Suretest Medical Pty Ltd, Stonestar Wholesale Pty Ltd, Hough Pharma Pty Ltd, and AM Diagnostics Pty Ltd.

All five federal government procurements were done by way of Limited Tender under Condition:10.3.b. Extreme urgency or events unforeseen. When, for reasons of extreme urgency brought about by events unforeseen by the relevant entity, the goods and services could not be obtained in time under open tender.

To meet the deadlines under these contract agreements it appears that some or all of of these companies may have failed to meet some or all previous contracts made with non-government agencies/corporations.

An ABC News article of 12 January 2022 highlighted one supplier as informing a private business customer by email that; the federal government had also "placed a mandate order and will be taking supply for their requirements out of this order arriving this week". "At this stage, we are unsure whether it will be the whole shipment or a portion"... 

Twitter on 11 January 2022 displayed a snapshot of section of an email:

While The Canberra Times on 13 January 2022 reported:

Private retailers have been told their rapid antigen test orders are being delayed and redirected by the federal government as it made an urgent tender for millions of tests.

Five tenders for rapid antigen tests worth just under $62 million were published on Tuesday by the Department of Health.

The tenders website states the condition is due to "extreme urgency or events unforeseen."

This comes after criticism from pharmacists that the government wouldn't procure extra kits for businesses under the national concession card scheme.

The Department of Health said this latest tender was not for additional rapid antigen tests and instead was a part of the broader procurement of more than 70 million rapid tests.

"Each proposal was independently assessed against consistent criteria before the departmental delegate made the decision to procure the tests," a spokesperson told NCA NewsWire.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Rapid antigen test orders not being redirected to the Department of Health

Widespread reporting that supplies of rapid antigen test (RAT) kits are being redirected to the Commonwealth Department of Health are untrue.

Date published: 14 January 2022

Media type: Statement

Audience: General public

Widespread reporting that supplies of rapid antigen test (RAT) kits are being redirected to the Commonwealth Department of Health are untrue.

The Department of Health reaffirms that the Department has not requisitioned all RAT supplies within and entering Australia.

The Department has made purchases in accordance with Commonwealth Procurement Rules, and has not sought to place itself ahead of other commercial and retail entities.

While we are aware there are supply constraints within the market, it is expected supply will normalise over the coming weeks.

The Australian Government has secured more than 80 million RATs for delivery in January and February. State and territory governments also advise that they have placed orders for approximately 130 million RATs.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

On or about 6 January 2022 the Australian Department of Agriculture, Water and the Environment entered into a $14,531.73 contract with Team Medical Supplies for supply of Rapid Antigen Tests between 6 to 20 January 2022. This contract was also limited tender but with no emergency condition attached.

In December 2021 the Australian Federal Police had entered into a $232,003.64 contract with Aspen Corporate Medical Options Pty Ltd T/as Corporate Medical Opti for supply of Rapid Antigen Tests between 23 December 2021 to 14 December 2022. This contract was open tender. 

All in all the Morrison Government has six active contracts for the purchase of rapid antigen test kits. It is disingenuous of the Dept. of Health to imply that the suppliers were not aware that the Morrison Government wanted est. 89 million test kits asap, in an import market already committed to supplying Australian states and territories with a further est.139 million test kits.

Someone was always going to miss out in a tight market and, in this case it is ordinary people, forced to pay often above-market price for a hard to find test kit in a national marketplace which has been artificially starved of product by government competition.

These days people are getting rather 'chatty' on Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison's Facebook page

On 10 January 2022 the Australian Prime Minister & Liberal MP for Cook Scott Morrison held a press conference accompanied by Lt. General John Frewen Co-ordinator General of Operation Covid Shield and Honorary Professor ANU Dr. Paul Kelly, Chief Medical Officer, Australian Government Department of Health.

At this press conference Morrison spoke on the subjects of COVID-19 public health rules, vaccination and booster programs, hospitalizations, death rates, transportation & supply, need for additional workers and the national economy. He answered around 11 questions from journalists concerning some of those subjects.

On the same day Morrison posted a video on his Facebook account.

All screen shots taken by Ronni Salt

It appears there were 5.8k comments received to this post of which only est. 2,226 were made visible by Morrison's social media team. 

Here are just a few of those in no particular order......

 

A fact sociologists worth their salt know, the better economists remember & conservative politicians can never accept – it is units of labour which drive production & productivity in any economy

The Conversation, 12 January 2022:

Australians are getting a stark reminder about how value is actually created in an economy, and how supply chains truly work.

Ask chief executives where value comes from and they will credit their own smart decisions that inflate shareholder wealth. Ask logistics experts how supply chains work and they will wax eloquent about ports, terminals and trucks. Politicians, meanwhile, highlight nebulous intangibles like “investor confidence” – enhanced, presumably, by their own steady hands on the tiller.

The reality of value-added production and supply is much more human than all of this. It is people who are the driving force behind production, distribution and supply.

Labour – human beings getting out of bed and going to work, using their brains and brawn to produce actual goods and services – is the only thing that adds value to the “free gifts” we harvest from nature. It’s the only thing that puts food on supermarket shelves, cares for sick people and teaches our children.

Even the technology used to enhance workers’ productivity – or sometimes even replace them – is ultimately the culmination of other human beings doing their jobs. The glorious complexity of the whole economy boils down to human beings, using raw materials extracted and tools built by other human beings, working to produce goods and services.

A narrow, distorted economic lens

The economy doesn’t work if people can’t work. So the first economic priority during a pandemic must be to keep people healthy enough to keep working, producing, delivering and buying.

That some political and business leaders have, from the outset of COVID-19, consistently downplayed the economic costs of mass illness, reflects a narrow, distorted economic lens. We’re now seeing the result – one of the worst public policy failures in Australia’s history.

The Omicron variant is tearing through Australia’s workforce, from health care and child care, to agriculture and manufacturing, to transportation and logistics, to emergency services.

The result is an unprecedented, and preventable, economic catastrophe. This catastrophe was visited upon us by leaders – NSW Premier Dom Perrotet and Prime Minister Scott Morrison in particular – on the grounds they were protecting the economy. Like a Mafia kingpin extorting money, this is the kind of “protection” that can kill you…...

Read full article here.

There is a question now hanging over Morrison & Frydenberg's 2022-23 Budget, geared as it is to fulfill the Coalition's yet to be revealed election promises rather than buttressing the nation against the adverse economic winds blowing through countless CBDs around the country. 

An estimated 50 per cent of the national workforce are currently absent from their employment on any given day due to COVID-19 - either workers have contracted the virus, are home looking after a dependent family member/s who is ill with it, have become a "close contact" and are isolating because of it, or their place of employment has temporarily closed due to lack of customers who are afraid of catching it.

It's not just a question of how far household consumption is likely to fall as this situation continues through at least another six weeks. 

Note: as an example, two previous Household Final Consumption Expenditure falls during the pandemic have been 12.2% June Qtr 2020 & 4.8% September Qtr 2021. Periods in which infection growth intensified. 

Neither is it all about the financial pain being felt by small businesses after every Coalition public policy error compounds economic distress at community level, sweeping away hope and income.

It is also about how much will the inevitable loss of production and productivity carve off the value bottom line of states and territories' State Domestic Product (SDP) and what impact that has on Australia's Gross Domestic Product (GDP) or the level of eyewatering public debt government has to service. 

Does the Australian economy have the resilience to withstand a full year of  SARS-CoV-2 running unchecked in the general population due to the Coalition's political policy of 'living with COVID'?

e-Petition and vigorous, sustained community lobbying saw 200ha of NSW core koala habitat protected in the last month of 2021

 

147 The Ruins Way, Port Macquarie NSW
IMAGE: realestate.com.au

On 24 November 2021 an e-Petition signed by 24,970 NSW residents was presented in the NSW Legislative Assembly by Greens MLA Tamara Green.

“To the Speaker and Members of the Legislative Assembly,

The coastal region of Port Macquarie Hastings LGA has one of the largest remnant populations of koalas in NSW. This was mapped as a koala hotspot for the NSW Koala Strategy 2018 by the Office of Environment and Heritage.

In the Port Macquarie LGA, most koala habitat lies within private land, outside protected areas such as National Parks. The koala population suffered huge casualties with the 2019 bushfires. The remaining unburnt core habitat around Lake Innes has become critical to sustain those individuals that survived the fires. An assessment by DPIE’s Biodiversity and Conservation Division concluded that post-fire, the urban population of koalas is now critical to Port Macquarie-Hastings Council LGA overall population if it has any hope of recovery. However, their habitat is shrinking rapidly because of ongoing land clearing for greenfield urban development.

147 Ruins Way, at 200ha, is the largest piece of privately-owned unburnt core koala habitat east of the Pacific Highway and is currently on the market for residential development. The property also provides habitat for numerous other threatened species including the critically endangered Swift Parrot and Regent Honeyeater, plus threatened forest owls, Square-tailed Kite, Little Lorikeet, Varied Sitella, Glossy-Black Cockatoo and Grey-headed Flying Fox.

We request that the NSW government purchase this land (e.g. with the $193 million set aside for koala population recovery) and protect it in perpetuity via a Nature Reserve or other secure, non-reversible tenure.”

On Christmas Eve, 24 December 2021 the NSW Minister for Environment and Heritage James Griffin formally responded that the former minister Matt Kean had purchased this vital koala habitat at 147 Ruins Way. The completed purchase from property developer Vilro Pty Ltd, being jointly funded by Koala Conservation Australia (KCA) and the NSW Government, with KCA supplying $3.5 million towards purchase cost and government the remainder believed to be in the vicinity of $7 million.

The e-petition is scheduled for debate on Thursday, 17 February 2022.

147 The Ruins Way, Port Macquarie NSW
IMAGE: Yahoo! News

On 11 January 2022 Australia's cumulative total of COVID-19 cases reached 1,042,293 infected men, women and children since the global pandemic began

State of Play in Australia on Day 716 of the COVID-19 Scourge.

 

"Outbreak management has failed" [Professor Mary-Louise McLaws, UNSW, Twitter, 11 January 2022]

Professor Mary-Louise McLaws (UNSW), is an epidemiologist with expertise in hospital infection and infectious diseases control. Her COVID-19 related activities include: member of the World Health Organization (WHO) Health Emergencies Program Experts Advisory Panel for Infection Prevention and Control Preparedness, Readiness and Response to COVID-19 and member of the NSW Clinical Excellence Commission COVID Infection Prevention and Control taskforce. She is the Focal Point for the WHO Global Outbreak Alert and Response Network (GOARN) in the School of Population Health.

A reminder that Grafton & Lismore air quality monitoring stations produce readings on an hourly basis and DPIE issues alerts for windblown dust or bushfire smoke as necessary

Rural air quality according to North Coast Local Land Services -  Pollutants (concentration unit: μg/m3) at 1-hour average, 6-7pm on 11 January 2022:

GRAFTON   Particles PM2.5 = 2 GOOD, Particles PM10 = 8 GOOD, Total Suspended Particles = 9*.

LISMORE Particles PM2.5 = 3 GOOD, Particles PM10 = 15 GOOD, Total Suspended Particles = 16*

* Total Suspended  Particles (TSP) are generated by a variety of sources - such as combustion and non-combustion processes, including windblown dust, sea salt, earthworks, mining activities, industrial processes, motor vehicle engines and fires. 

Air quality in the Northern Rivers is monitored on an hourly basis and can be checked at https://www.dpie.nsw.gov.au/air-quality/rural-air-quality-network-live-data.

Air quality categories can be found at 

https://www.dpie.nsw.gov.au/air-quality/understanding-air-quality-data

NSW Air Quality Alerts are issued on days when pollution levels are forecast to be unhealthy or very unhealthy. For information on other related health matters please visit the NSW Health website. 

Air Quality by Region in an easy to read form at 

https://www.airquality.nsw.gov.au/.

You can sign up to receive daily SMS or email updates with air quality ratings and forecasts, for your selected locations within New South Wales.