At Last - A Glimmer of Hope

One strange feature of life in lockdown is the morbid fascination that we all have in waiting for the release of the new daily update on COVID numbers. These numbers are released around 11 am each day and I suspect that millions of Victorians are scanning the Internet at that time, in order to get the latest news.

Of course, of late the news has been almost invariably bad. In that case, everybody's morale drops. It is especially bad when we hear that it is yet another new record. You can almost feel that it is like a kick to the guts. Each day we hope that the dreaded second wave will peak and then start to wane. At that time we could start to feel that we are again headed in the right direction and that the harsh restrictions will eventually be relaxed a little.

The past couple of days did seem to suggest that we might actually have reached the peak, although statistics are notoriously fickle. Today we were told that we suffered "only" 278 new infections in Victoria. Compared to the previous numbers of around 700, this was actually quite welcome news. I guess everything is relative, as a couple of months ago, such figures would have been regarded as a disaster.

We can only hope that the trend becomes clearer over the next few days. I will put my neck out and predict a number of somewhere around 220 for tomorrow. I hope it's less.

The other news that has been coming out over the past couple of days has been conflicting accounts of the hotel quarantine debacle. Dan Andrews has been getting a grilling about why Victoria did not accept the ADF assistance in running the hotel quarantine. He has replied that no such offer of help was ever made. This was immediately disputed by the Minister of Defense, who pointed out that offer was made, not once, but on multiple occasions.

Whatever the findings of the inquiries, it is a case of shutting the stable door after the proverbial COVID horse has bolted. It is very evident that terrible mistakes were made, and these will cost us individually and collectively for a long time to come.Read more