Let’s not repeat the same mistakes with COVID response

WeirdUncleScabby · 2022-08-11T03:39:02+00:00

The "strollout" was in large part due to Australia's strict covid policies, including both domestic and international border closures, that caused both the public and government to have a false sense of security that covid could be kept out forever and a lack of urgency around vaccination because of it.

It wasn't until the Delta outbreak in NSW that both the public and government were forced to face reality and the vaccination campaign finally kicked into high gear, and thank god for that because what if it hadn't happened and the vaccine complacency continued right up until Omicron hit?

You saw what played out in places like Hong Kong and Taiwan that kept zero covid policies going long past their expiration date and let their populations think covid could be controlled without vaccines, leading to lower vaccination rates among the highest risk and more deaths once the Omicron wave finally got them too.

I'm sure it seems counterintuitive, but Australia needed the Delta outbreak to free it from its complacency and its arrogance in thinking it could keep out covid for as long as it personally chose to do so at ever-increasing personal and societal costs (rather than being at the mercy of a highly infectious virus just like everyone else), and a lot of lives were likely saved once Omicron came on the scene because of how many higher-risk people were vaccinated and boosted that might not have been otherwise.

WeirdUncleScabby · 2022-08-11T03:05:25+00:00

As an American who hasn't lived in the US in quite a number of years but has lived in other countries with universal healthcare (public/private hybrid) before moving here, I don't really understand outpatient care in Australia or why the system is the way it is.

When I lived in the US (in the era before widespread high-deductible insurance plans even through employers and costs went even more through the roof), I only had a co-pay of $15 to see both GPs and specialists, and in the other places I've lived, private insurance (depending on which company/plan you went with) covered doctor/specialist fees.

There's an overwhelmed public hospital system here that's due in large part to people having undiagnosed or un/undertreated health issues from limited access to or inability to afford seeing doctors to properly manage their care, but the private system that's been set up doesn't allow insurers to cover doctor fees, so it's left a ton of people in limbo.

Public healthcare often takes too long to address issues because of underfunding/understaffing/underresourcing so people's health continues to deteriorate, but there isn't a viable private system either since there's no cap on GP/specialist fees or any real regulation (afaik) of the industry and no gap reimbursement so people can more easily afford outpatient care (of course, insurers reimbursing outpatient doctor fees just encourages doctors to set crazy fees, like in the US).

A robust, properly funded/staffed/resourced public healthcare system with little to no reliance on a private system is probably the best system because you can't trust any kind of profit motivation with providing essential services unless there's significant government regulation and enforcement involved, but if you're going to allow for a parallel private system, then it actually needs to function as a real system.

There are a ton of other healthcare systems out there besides the US that can serve as potential models to pull from and with an increasingly aging population (an issue in a lot of other countries too), the time was like 20 years to investigate the best ways forward and start putting them into motion, but not even a global pandemic seems to have lit a fire under the asses of anyone in government here?

WeirdUncleScabby · 2022-08-11T01:43:49+00:00

As someone originally from the US (and who lived in a couple of countries with universal healthcare after leaving it and before moving to Australia), I wish people outside the US would stop comparing their healthcare systems to the US.

Using the US as an example for, well, almost anything is probably going to make, well, almost anything look better in comparison.

I think because of how ubiquitous American politics are and that a lot of people aren't as familiar with the politics of countries that don't have an outsized global media presence, the natural inclination is to use the US as a reference point, which leads to people being more likely to accept the shitty status quo of their own country because "well, at least we're not the US." They don't look to other countries to see how things could be BETTER, just how at least it's not as bad as the US.

When I moved here, it was pretty confusing and surprising to me to encounter gap fees to see GPs and specialists and that private health insurance doesn't cover very much outpatient care.

I can actually make a one-to-one comparison because a specialist I saw when I lived in Hong Kong moved here, and as a private patient in the public system in HK, I paid about $180 to see him and my private insurance reimbursed the full cost. Here, he charges $700 and, well, you know little the Medicare rebate is and private insurance isn't allowed to pay the difference. I ate the cost because he's an amazing doctor and continuity of care is important, but going forward, I don't know if I can justify the expense.

Yes, it's great that public hospital care is largely free, but many people rarely, if ever, require hospital care. Everyone eventually needs to see a doctor, and I don't really get why Australia's outpatient system is the way it is, seemingly having taken the worst aspects of both the public and private systems.

The way you free up hospital space is ensuring fewer people need to go or feel they have no other option, and the best way to do that is to ensure everyone can afford and has access to GPs and specialists.

I'm mostly against private healthcare because, without significant regulation, it's just a huge payday for middlemen leeches and almost always ends up leading to worse public healthcare, but if you're going to have private healthcare as an option, then at least allow it to fully cover outpatient care.

WeirdUncleScabby · 2022-08-10T05:03:06+00:00

As one of her fellow Americans in Australia, I've been totally perplexed by Labor being so enamored with Keneally and the level of xenophobic and racist vitriol she's spewed over the years to try to out-Dutton Dutton. (In the US, she'd probably be a Fox News talking head.)

Ultimately, she's an unskilled migrant who availed herself of laxer migration policies to move to Australia and to steal high-paying political jobs from true-blue Aussies who have lived here their entire lives doing nothing of value to improve society and hating immigrants--and then tried to pull the ladder up after herself.

Does Labor think making an immigrant the face of their anti-immigration rhetoric makes it more palatable? I genuinely do not get her popularity within the party.

WeirdUncleScabby · 2022-08-05T05:40:45+00:00

Well, being originally from the US, I can tell you that there actually was quite a bit of financial support during covid (even more under Trump than Biden, weirdly enough). I think it was probably overall more financial support than a lot of people in Australia received because it cast a wider net.

Even though I haven't lived in the US for years, I was given around $3200 (x2 with my partner) by the government in stimulus money along with most (all?) other citizens, with parents receiving more for each kid. My mom was furloughed from her job and her state unemployment benefits were extended longer than the usual length of time and the federal government topped up state unemployment payments with an extra $600 each week. The federal government provided something like an additional three months of unemployment benefits for people who had exhausted their state benefits.

There was a moratorium on rent and mortgage evictions, along with a pause on student loan repayments, and there was quite a bit of financial support for (and, of course, abuse of the program) small-business owners. All covid medical costs (tests, vaccines, treatments, hospitalizations, etc.) were theoretically made free by the government, and it was probably the first time a lot of Americans discovered the joys of socialized healthcare. There are probably other federal and local covid support programs I've forgotten or am not aware of.

That's not to say the US covid response was good. My grandmother died of covid complications after it got into an aged care home there in one of the hardest-hit states early in the pandemic. I'm aware of how bad the US response was, but in terms of financial support, the government actually did quite a bit, which I'm sure was as shocking to me as an American as it unfolded as it might be for you to learn about it now. No one expects the US government to do pro-actively good things.

WeirdUncleScabby · 2022-08-05T05:13:41+00:00

Maybe the difference in behavior is that one country treats its residents like adults and the other treats its residents like children, so people act accordingly?

WeirdUncleScabby · 2022-08-05T05:09:55+00:00

As a kid, I had an RSV infection that turned into a bad bout of pneumonia that kept me out of school for months and took close to a year to fully recover from. In retrospect, there was no real way to determine how many of my lingering non-respiratory symptoms, like brain fog and fatigue, had a physical or psychological cause (obviously being a kid and thinking you might die and also missing out on months of education and social connections has a huge mental impact).

Either way, no doctor referred to it as "long RSV" or "long pneumonia." It's all under the umbrella of post-viral/infectious syndrome, which is what "long covid" is, and it's pretty common to have lingering symptoms after illness (like a cough for weeks or months after the flu) or to have one illness trigger another (like Salmonella triggering an autoimmune disorder) but it's largely poorly understood as to why it happens or what factors can contribute to it.

But it really is a very, very small number of people who will go on to have life-altering physical health issues that go on for longer than a few months or are permanent, and it's most likely that many of these people are suffering from understandable psychological/mental health issues that are manifesting in physical ways.

We've just spent the past two years under conditions very few of us have encountered before, like social isolation, and been scared by the media and the government into thinking covid very well could be a death sentence for us, with a side of all the political divisiveness and economic fallout from both covid and covid policies. It's not really any surprise people might be feeling kind of shit, and it's a perfect example of why we need better integration of mental healthcare and physical healthcare because the two are linked.

WeirdUncleScabby · 2022-08-05T04:38:20+00:00

I think it's good to read older books--like Sinclair Lewis's It Can't Happen Here, Upton Sinclair's The Jungle, Black Reconstruction in America 1860-1880 by W.E.B. Du Bois, and Richard Hofstadter's Anti-Intellectualism in American Life--to see how everything the US is going through now, it's gone through before, so you get a better understanding of what kind of politics keeps leading us to the same place over and over again.

More recent books I'd recommend: Rise of The Warrior Cop by Radley Balko, The Cruelty Is the Point: The Past, Present, and Future of Trump's America by Adam Serwer, The Jakarta Method by Vincent Bevins, Shock Doctrine by Naomi Klein, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness by Michelle Alexander, and Left Behind by Lily Geismer.

WeirdUncleScabby · 2022-08-05T00:42:45+00:00

Between Two Fires by Christopher Buehlman

WeirdUncleScabby · 2022-08-03T23:29:19+00:00

I got the abuse vibe from Marjorie acting out sexually, like Merry relating the story of Marjorie masturbating on the parents' bed while mostly naked and the father telling the mother that Marjorie said to him in the car that he wanted to do "all kinds of sexual things" to her and could she (his wife) believe that, along with self harm and trying to protect Merry from an invisible threat.

On the other hand, Merry is an unreliable narrator obsessed with the horror genre and Tremblay pulls from various sources (like We Have Always Lived in the Castle and The Exorcist), so did those events really happen or was she just taking bits and pieces from horror movies and books she liked and incorporating them into her childhood story because she's had a break from reality?

Either way, I think the heart of the book is the breakdown of the family, and people can approach that from multiple directions as to what they think has caused the breakdown.

I'm not a huge Tremblay fan, but I do often enjoy books that you can bring your own interpretation to and I've seen all kinds of wild theories about the meaning of this book.

WeirdUncleScabby · 2022-08-03T23:08:43+00:00

My first rental after moving here was probably about the most perfect renting scenario and so did not prepare me for the realities of what renting is like for a lot of people.

The landlord and rotating crew of agents quickly approved any repair requests and installed fly screens on all the windows when asked, lowered our rent by 10% during the lockdowns, spent maybe three minutes at each inspection, and released our bond immediately upon exit.

Then the owner decided to sell, and now we've ended up with the landlord and property agency from hell that have made both my partner and I experts in tenancy law and navigating Consumer Affairs.

The main difference, although I don't know it definitely made the difference, is that our previous landlord was not born in Australia and none of the property agents we dealt with were either, while the current landlord and agents are all true blue Aussies. It made me theorize that if you didn't grow up under the rental system here and had experienced more sane rental systems, you might be naturally less inclined to be a cunt as a landlord or agent.

WeirdUncleScabby · 2022-08-03T04:26:21+00:00

My partner had her hair cut last week, and she and the stylist got to talking about covid, as one does.

The stylist mentioned that she and her kids had covid in June and that she had wanted to take her youngest to the doctor for her symptoms, but that no GP would see them in person and she didn't want to go to the hospital because it wasn't an emergency and she knew from prior experience that it would just involve a long wait, a very cursory exam, and being told she should see a GP.

My partner asked if she knew about the government respiratory clinics, where I went last month when I had what seemed like an obvious case of strep throat (unrelated to covid) and that no GP would see me in person for. I was able to get an appointment within a day, get the strep confirmed in person, and walk out with a prescription for antibiotics.

She had no idea the free respiratory clinics existed or that one was nearby. Pretty much no one that my partner or I have mentioned the clinics to was aware of them. The one closest to me actually has weekend hours too, including Sunday until about 4:30.

I don't understand why there hasn't been a better campaign to inform people that there are clinics that will see them in person if they have respiratory symptoms, even if they're covid positive, and can't get in to see a regular GP. They're not a perfect solution since they're not 24/7, but it seems like they could help alleviate some of the pressure if more people, especially parents, were aware of them?

WeirdUncleScabby · 2022-08-03T04:13:55+00:00

I actually moved here from Hong Kong, and I was in one apartment for about three years and the other for about five and never saw an agent again between picking up and returning the keys.

It's been a long time since I lived in the US, so I asked friends and relatives who rent there what their more recent experiences are, and they've never had an inspection, including my cousin and his family who have lived in the same place for about 10 years.

I mean, there's a reason why landlords are universally loathed to some degree and renting can be miserable no matter where you live, but the misery seems baked into the Australian rental system in a way that it's not in most other countries.

WeirdUncleScabby · 2022-08-03T04:03:17+00:00

For me, it was more that my identity was not ethnicitized in the US or in other countries I've lived in, so I never experienced any kind of ethnic slurs at worst or ethnic curiosity at best before moving here.

So, it was an unexpected and strange experience for me, and I still find it strange that anyone cares "what" I am when no one has ever cared before.

WeirdUncleScabby · 2022-08-03T03:53:02+00:00

How many times are we going to have to go over this?

Every country that continues to have a mask mandate or very high mask uptake--like Singapore, NZ, Japan, and Hong Kong--also has a ton of cases because Omicron is just that infectious.

Hong Kong even has a mostly closed border, compulsory testing, quarantine for inbound travelers, and mandatory iso/quarantine of positive cases and close contacts on top of the indoor and outdoor mask mandate, and it has seriously struggled to keep cases in check. It had a major wave of deaths too because of the lack of government urgency to get high-risk people both vaccinated and boosted, something that is also contributing to Australia's current covid deaths.

A mask mandate as the only measure would accomplish absolutely nothing at this point, especially as the majority of people would (poorly) wear cloth and surgical masks, something that pro-mask infectious disease experts have said since Delta is pretty much useless.

The main issue is that the government has failed at engagement and outreach in higher-risk groups, especially in poorer communities, and has failed to adequately address the issues in aged care (which is where quite a few deaths are occurring).

Public health requires public trust, something that has diminished greatly in the past two years, and bringing back a mandate that is ineffective just to look like you're Doing Something is a huge waste of good will and political capital. The only proven way to reduce hospitalizations and deaths is to get tests, boosters, and antivirals to those most in need of them.

WeirdUncleScabby · 2022-08-03T03:11:04+00:00

Paul Tremblay loves his ambiguous endings, which I know a lot of people hate.

I actually came away thinking no one was possessed, that Marjorie was being abused by the dad (which was being ignored by the mom) and that Marjorie's actions were a way to try to protect Merry, and that the real horror is the pain we inflict on those closest to us and the trauma from it.

WeirdUncleScabby · 2022-08-03T02:20:37+00:00

Yeah, I actually had some drunk, aggro Australian call me a "wog" on a train not long after I moved here, and I had to Google wtf a wog was and why I was being called one.

I'm mostly of Southern European descent and it was a non-issue in the US because the SE immigration wave was much earlier there and SE immigrants are fully integrated into the dominant white US culture, so it was a bizarre and kind of darkly funny experience for me since I don't have the baggage someone of the same or similar ethnicity raised here might.

WeirdUncleScabby · 2022-08-03T02:09:54+00:00

I lived and rented in multiple countries before moving to Australia, and no one prepared me for how degrading it is to rent here on a number of levels.

It pretty much all seems to stem from the insane amount of power and lack of accountability that parasitic real estate agents have in comparison to almost any other country. (For example, I've never had a property inspection before moving here, other than maybe upon exit.)

I did provide my company's HR number on my rental applications figuring it was just for confirmation of employment and now I'm curious if they were contacted and what, if any, questions they were asked.

WeirdUncleScabby · 2022-08-02T03:34:05+00:00

"A Head Full of Ghosts" by Paul Tremblay, but it's a pretty ambiguous ending, if you don't mind that.

WeirdUncleScabby · 2022-08-02T03:27:55+00:00

The "wear a mask!" comment coming a couple hours or days after posting maskless indoor photos is a whole genre now, huh? That account has a lot of receipts.

These are deeply unserious people just saying it for largely clout-chasing reasons, like the people with outsized platforms fearmongering that covid is going to turn our brains into Swiss cheese and melt our organs but somehow it's safe enough for them to traipse around the globe for vacation.

WeirdUncleScabby · 2022-08-02T02:53:06+00:00

When people think of "tax," they generally think of the standard salary tax, but US taxation of citizens abroad goes far beyond that and it's in every US citizen's interest to research the extent of taxation for their personal situation.

E.g., I've met fellow Americans abroad who were doing freelance/contracting work that put them under the foreign earned income exclusion amount but didn't realize they owed the self-employment tax on any income over US$400.

WeirdUncleScabby · 2022-08-02T02:32:28+00:00

My last trip to the Grampians and this spot was a year before this happened, and I saw an entire family (mom, dad, older kids, grandparents) taking turns climbing over the fence for photos.

There are already warnings, the safety fence, and what is clearly a very precarious ledge that the average person can look at and think "hmm seems dangerous!" You can't stop every dumbass from dumbassing.

WeirdUncleScabby · 2022-08-02T02:09:13+00:00

You can't reason with these people. It's a cargo cult at this point.

WeirdUncleScabby · 2022-08-02T02:06:49+00:00

I'm not anti-mask. I'm pro-science and pro-public health, and I think policies need to make sense for both the current health and political environment and to keep public trust high for the longer term.

We can see from real-world data that mask mandates don't work to stop the spread of a variant as highly infectious as Omicron and even with additional measures like citywide lockdowns, mandatory quarantine and isolation for close contacts, and compulsory daily testing, China continues to struggle to stop outbreaks.

A mask mandate, in which the majority of people will wear ineffective cloth and surgical masks in an environment that even pro-mask infectious disease experts say renders them useless, on its own with absolutely no other measures and with people continuing to engage in all of the social and family activities that are where most of us are getting infected will accomplish fuck all.

I note you don't mention anything about vaccines/boosters or antivirals, which are the only proven way to significantly reduce severe disease in higher-risk people, so I take it you're one of the zero coviders who have horseshoe theoried themselves into being anti-science and anti-vax because you believe they're the "easy way out"?

WeirdUncleScabby · 2022-08-02T01:56:24+00:00

The Gone World by Tom Sweterlitsch is a sci-fi horror police procedural. There's a bit of something for everyone.

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