Melbourne's outbreak (over 100 cases yesterday, another 70 today) is now being described as involving one or more super-spreaders from the dodgy hotel quarantine situation. A couple of days ago, Victoria was the only place in the country to record new cases and I believe in the last few days the only cases outside Victoria have been international quarantined returnees and a two people who left Victoria after quarantine and tested positive in Northern Territory and NSW respectively.
Every other state either has had closed borders, ie mandatory 14 day isolation periods, with Victoria for a while (SA, NT, Queensland, Tasmania, WA), or has now put a ban on travellers from the specific areas identified by Victoria as hotspots (NSW and ACT, in their first departures from open borders so far). Ten of the 18 AFL teams, the ones based in Victoria, are evacuating to be based in Queensland. Sydney and Perth for a few weeks.
It has gotten into some high density public housing estates and
the Victorian government has elected to flood them with cops on every storey of the buildings (500 for 3000 residents) and completely ban residents from leaving their apartments. That's a pretty bad look when this is a community who have generally pretty negative experience of the police, certainly can't afford fines, and is happening while the broader lockdowns are still on a suburb by suburb basis. Meaning we've had absurdities like football games being played 2 kilometres from where poor, marginalised people with a high rate of mental illness and other complex needs are basically being imprisoned.
Pretty grim approach from an ostensibly progressive (but massively cop loving) government, especially after
last time during the first lockdown, the same Victorian cops
were mostly targetting poor and non-white areas with fines having little correlation to where the virus actually was (at that point it was mostly in affluent suburbs after being brought back from trips to places like Aspen).
