an old beta-male baboon

 

Comrades,

Am I alone in being astonished - flabbergasted - by the extraordinary enthusiasm with which Sydney has embraced the COVID19 vaccines?

Never in my wildest dreams did I think NSW - and when you are talking NSW you really mean Sydney - would get anywhere near a 93%+ at least one shot Corona vaccine coverage in the 16+ population, and 85%+ on two shots. Sydney at almost five and a half million good burghers is enormous, add in Newcastle, the Central Coast and The 'Gong and that's another million, everyone else lives on the North Coast, while almost no-one in their right mind toughs it out west of The Divide. As PJ Keating once said "If you don't live in Sydney, you're camping out". The State Govt. run Winnebago's used to isolate the infected arrived in the Back of Bourke before the vaccines did, so little wonder jab-rates really lag out there in the bush. Not that it statistically matters much at all. Sydney people said "we're sick of this", the Govt. said "get vaccinated", and they did, in their millions, with no further incentives required.

After the strollout known as Scomo's "it's not a race" clusterfuck was resolved, and the vaccine floodgates opened, who knew that a heaving steaming metropolis would go to the clinic en masse, not once, but twice? Even though I was dead set wrong saying we'd be lucky to get to 70%, let alone 80%, in my defence, I've said all along that this "vaccine hesitancy" thing is a myth, just as it turned out to be. There will be such blanket vaccine coverage once the children are injected (and Pfizer & Moderna both reckon they're all systems go for the 5-11 year olds) you won't need no "vaccine passport" for much at all really, (unless you are desperate to travel at any cost, want to book a show, have dinner someplace fancy, get pissed in a licensed premises or go to the cricket - even then, vaccine requirements will fade over time). The Good Lady Wife attended The Salon just yesterday and was never asked for her vaccination status. QR codes are already old hat around here, when they used to be de rigueur for getting food & drink during the four months of lockdown. Just the other day, I found myself standing in front of the World of Fruit looking at the slim pickin's in the street-front produce display and counted nine customers roll right on in in a couple of minutes, without a blink of an eye from anyone, by the time I'd found the Gladys App on my phone to ping the QR code with. Why bother is the call - if the contact tracers are never going to get back you anyway? Folks will not be willingly surveilled for nothing, so that's it for QR codes, just like the multi-million dollar CovidSafe App - which did precisely SFA while some faceless geeks got rich off it. So, Sydney is giving itself a hearty pat on the back and a pull of the pud, yet again, big time. "God!" people will whinge at dinner parties "have you any idea what it was like living during lockdown in an 'LGA of Concern'? Absolutely appalling!", they'll cry. They'll also say "Lord help WA and QLD, those hicks are really dragging the chain on this one and bringing the whole joint down with them", with vax rates a full 20% behind Sydney/NSW. Never mind the fractured Federation, sitting ducks, they are.They won't know what's hit them, and hit them it will.

Everybody has their vax story from early on when they were in short supply and people were downright loose with the truth just to get a jab, any jab, but it'd be hard to top my 2nd dose, which was administered in an old fashioned barber's chair on 17 August. Gold class treatment. My beloved GP had been giving me consistently inconsistent advice on this one all along (and who could blame him?), but recommended that I should get on with it after my first, and get fully dosed up as the disease "is out and about at the moment". The only vaccines he does are the 'flu and the kiddies, so I looked up HotDoc, and saw a local medical centre were giving away Astra-Zeneca within 48 hours at a pop-up in the Old Sunbeam Factory just around the corner which was demolished for 700 flats years ago. Had no idea where, but then realised it was a shopping centre space that some shifty characters had leased and fitted out as a barbers' shop as a front for a drug running operation. When the Delta mutant hit, the dodgy tenants abandoned the 'barber's shop' but left the fittings behind. There was a single leather padded chair with a foot pedal to manoeuvre the patient up or down by the health pro in the full PPE, who was literally diving at you with the needle before you'd even rolled yr sleeve up, and then shooed you along for the next one. No time to get relaxed & comfortable. Someone else does the paperwork that tells Canberra that yr done, it's over in a few minutes, and yr another statistic...and still I have the hair of an old beta-male baboon.

With a deeply deeply conservative free market capitalist running dog with a laissez-faire approach to killer diseases now in charge of the Great State of NSW, Premier "Let 'er rip!" Perrottet kicked off in a grand fashion by welcoming the resumption of international travel to and from Sydney before Chrissy, which got ScoMo all a flustered. You'll recall that Scotty from Marketing referenced the Kid Premier as "a fuckwit" when he called for the re-reinstatement of Jobkeeper a while back, so the unintelligible tongue-speaking PM was quick to put the upstart back in his place..."hang on there sonny Jim, immigration is not yr Department, hold yr horses". Yeah, yeah, it'll be a long time until the likes of you or me can afford to easily visit any corner of the globe on a whim like back in the day (i.e. two years ago). So, Tetter's, in his infinite wisdom, has offered every citizen of NSW a free $50 accommodation voucher to spend anywhere they like in the Great State and the taxpayer will pick up the chit. Woot! He's unaware that a pineapple won't buy you a night in a 1950's-style drive-in motel room with a urine stained mattress and rodent droppings in a joint like, say, Gilgandra. Obviously, he doesn't get out much. As it is, residents of Sydney are still prohibited from leaving town for 'the regions' until November 1, with December 1 looming as the "all bets are off" date. Which is something of novelty, given the annual traditional Silly Season officially starts next Tuesday and runs right through to Australia Day. There is only one thing certain when everything remains a day-to-day proposition -  this year's Silly Season will be the silliest seen in many a long year.

In the meantime...as the bodies pile high...in San Telmo, Buenos Aires... 

 

Translation: In Memoriam of the victims of Yellow Fever in the year 1871 and to the heroic residents of San Telmo who fought the Dantesque conditions of the epidemic.

"Will similar memorials be erected for the victims of COVID-19?"... so went the caption when I saw this photo.

In this instance, the death toll for the barrio was about ten thousand, so fair enough, but commemorations involving mass graves pose interesting questions, to which the answer is always probably...ah...well...no. Took a century to get this one up.