This is my series about trying to find our footing in Australia. It will no doubt be a series of joy and sadness and struggle... Things will turn out alright? Won't they?

Part 1: Settling In and Adjusting

Well... Australia seems to be quite a bit behind the Coronavirus response in comparison to the Netherlands and Europe. Most of that has been the fact that Australia managed to actually have near zero Coronavirus cases for quite a large chunk of the previous two years due to strict border controls and heavy lockdown responses to local outbreaks. However, all that came to an end when Delta arrived, and the more virulent version made it out of the hotel quarantines...

... and with Omicron, the game is essentially over. Australia will have to start to transition to what Europe has already been dealing with, and start to acknowledge the fact that virus is out in the open public and it will be next to impossible to contain. Sadly, Australia is crazily unprepared for such a circumstance, as it is running low on supplies and testing supplies... it appears that the government has mistaken their previous good luck to be a proxy for the quality of their response. Sadly, the new virus variant has made it clear that the country had a single one line defence... a strong border control... and past that, there was essentially nothing.

However, there are many relics of the old containment tactics in place. The one that irks me a little bit is the "mandatory" check-in at public areas. Now, this is a good thing when you are really trying to contain and isolate cases and outbreaks. But I do question the purpose of it if people are getting multiple pings of close contacts every second day... with instructions to isolate and/or get PCR tested.

... and all of that is pretty hilarious, as it is next to impossible to get a PCR test at the moment, as the supplies for processing the tests are running out at the free government testing centres... and that is if you were really wanting to stand in line for about 5 hours to get one! So, they have been encouraging people to get sneltests (Rapid Antigen Tests, RATs)... but there aren't any to be found! Plus, if you do manage to find one... expect to pay poop-loads for one! Again, the lovely people making rules in the capitalist system are those with very little financial worries (safe salaried jobs in this case...)... testing positive as a casual/freelancer doesn't mean a two week paid holiday at home... it means no income for that period, and the potential disaster if it happens regularly. So, what is the incentive... don't test, don't tell... this isn't rocket science... sure, if you are going to make these isolation rules mandatory, then you need to be able to support people who want to do the right thing (like me...). Sure, you will overpay some people who are out to scam the system... but lets not kid ourselves, the real scammers have been the companies and corporations that have taken in hundreds of millions in public money whilst making huge profits... all because they screamed the loudest and threatened to lay off their workforce. So, they got subsidies AND bigger profits... and don't have to pay anything back.

So, all of this seems to reflect the pitfalls of lessons that should have been learnt from the rest of the world when we all fell flat on our faces whilst Australia was safe and snug. However, politicians being what they are... they decided that taking a victory lap and patting themselves on the back was the order of the day, and to do NOTHING to prepare for the breach of border. Thank goodness none of them are actually responsible for cyber-security or anything of any real importance. It is common knowledge that security is best done by layers and depth, not just a single hard shell.

Which leads me to this annoying habit that people here have been trained into... checking-in EVERYWHERE! I can see the point of this if you are really near zero and tracking isolated cases. All I can see is a training of a bad security habit... Do you know where that QR code is sending you? What URL, what code it is trying to ask your app to run? I'm surprised that there haven't been more fake "check-in" codes sending people off to scam or malicious sites. We teach novice computer users to NEVER click on random links... and yet this is what we are training the whole population to do!

... this is not going to end well.

I can also be found cross-posting at:
Hive
Steem
Publish0x

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