There has been mass confusion in Victoria about who can access childcare. The Premier’s office has now confirmed children can access childcare if just one of their parents is an authorised worker.

And so it says in The Age. An “authorised worker”? You do have to wonder where this will end up, and if you don’t wonder, you really should.

And this is from the US about us: Police Fire Rubber Bullets and Pepper-Spray Into Large Crowd of Anti-Lockdown Protesters in Melbourne (VIDEO). They think this is appalling. Why don’t we?

And this is also about us from the US: Massive Unrest as Australia Adopts China’s Authoritarian ‘COVID-Zero’ Approach.

The emergence of SARS-CoV-2 and the resulting illness, COVID-19, has caused mass hysteria on a global scale. Perhaps no response is as shocking as what we see in Australia. The country is included in the group of western democracies globally and among the Five Eyes intelligence community members. Yet, the nation’s response to the pandemic can only be described as authoritarian.

I find this particularly on the money. We really do accept insanity as a rational response.

In early August, Melbourne, Australia, imposed a mystifying sixth lockdown because eight cases of COVID-19 were detected. As cases of the Delta variant spread from the early clusters in the cities, nearly every major metro went back to implementing lockdowns. They remain in place and bar people from leaving their homes except for essential exercise, shopping, and caregiving.

Eight deaths in the midst of a flu epidemic in a state with 5.5 million should hardly cause a tremor never mind eight cases. We are such clowns.

A friend of mine who is a doctor was made to stay home for fourteen days because he was in some supermarket when some other person who supposedly tested positive was there at the same time. The kinds of damage we are doing to our ability to just get on with life is absurd.