COVID-19 / Australia / 21st, 24th & 26th June Updates

So after 40 days free of new local infections, New South Wales, or more succinctly, Sydney has recorded at least 11 new cases and are known as the Bondi Cluster.

Contact venues are however spread across the city and surrounding local government areas.

Testing has been ramped up again across the region.
The state Premier yesterday mandated masks in several settings in Greater Sydney, the Blue Mountains and the Shellharbour and Wollongong local government areas.

We are not affected in the Shoalhaven.
Worryingly it is the extremely contagious Delta strain.
How did this happen?
Well, a driver whose job it is to drive international air crews from the airport to quarantine hotels became infected and passed it onto the community.
He was unvaccinated!

Yes really! 

The powers that be allowed this to happen. Unbelievable!

Meanwhile the vaccine rollout continues at a snail’s pace.

Around only 3% of the population is fully vaccinated.

Not only are vaccine supply lines in chaos but the health authorities have decided that the most available vaccine, AstraZeneca, is now not ‘safe’ for people under 60 due to the very rare blood clotting issue ie around 3 per 100,000 after first dose.

This has caused some panic for those who have already had their first shot and are now cancelling their second.

Talk about a fustercluck!

The alternative Pfizer vaccine is in very short supply and no one really knows when this will change.

Both of us are going ahead with the second AZ shot.

Update: 24th June 

NSW was on high alert after reporting 16 new locally acquired cases of COVID-19 in the Greater Sydney area on Wednesday, with 31 cases now linked to the Bondi cluster and others under investigation.
Any resident who lives or works in the seven council area hot spots is banned from travelling outside metropolitan Sydney for the next week, spoiling school holiday travel plans for thousands of families.

Queensland, Western Australia and South Australia reintroduced hard border closures for Greater Sydney and residents in the declared hotspots were banned from travel to Victoria.
NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian has given her clearest indication that Sydney is on the brink of a lockdown.

With winter school holidays starting on the weekend and the inevitable influx of people from Sydney into our region, despite the travel ban, we will be once again going into self isolation.

Update: 26th June

A total of 80 cases are now linked to the Bondi cluster with 20 of these cases associated with a birthday party in western Sydney. There have now been 82 locally acquired cases since 16th June when the index case for the Bondi cluster, a driver who transported international flight crew, was reported. As a result of the now wide spread infections, NSW  Premier Gladys Berejiklian has announced a strict lockdown for all of Greater Sydney, the Blue Mountains, the Central Coast and Wollongong from 6pm Saturday until midnight Friday July 9.
Too little, too late?
We’ll just have to wait and see.
No cases in our area, the Shoalhaven, yet.
These are the lockdown conditions:
-Strict stay-at-home orders will apply to all people in the Greater Sydney including Blue Mountains, Central Coast and Wollongong from 6pm Saturday 26th June.
-The lockdown will remain in place until Friday July 9.Everyone in Greater Sydney must stay at home unless it is for an essential reason: shopping for essential goods, medical or compassionate needs, exercise outdoors in groups of 10 or less, essential work or education.
-Community sport will not be permitted during the lockdown.
-Weddings will not be allowed from 11.59pm, Sunday, while funerals will be limited to one person per four square metres, capped at 100 people. Masks will be compulsory while indoors.
-Anyone in regional NSW who has been in Greater Sydney since June 21 must self isolate from 14 days since they left Sydney.*
-Police will be using number plate recognition technology to monitor for vehicles from Greater Sydney.

*this is an VERY important condition as far as we are concerned.

Final Fence Finished

The bushfires of 2019/20 destroyed or damaged at least 50% of our boundary fences.

For the last 18 months we have been replacing and repairing them with the help of our friend Stirls.

And just when we think we are finished, trees come down over them or our creek floods requiring more remedial work.

But that situation seemed now under control so we decided to completely replace a dividing fence which separates the western and eastern paddocks.

This fence has never been touched since I moved in here nearly 3 decades ago so was in some disrepair. The gate posts had also rotted and collapsed.

We removed all the rusting hinge joint wire fencing and took out the remaining wooden posts which will make good firewood.

The large strainers at each end were in reasonable condition so they remained with new stays installed.

We then stretched four strands of high tensile barbed wire to a new strainer where we had decided to hang a new repositioned gate and then a short run on to the creek edge.

We decided to use steel pickets instead of wooden posts as they are easier to install.

About a third of the area crossed is permanently quite boggy so there we used 2.4m pickets with the drier areas taking the conventional 1.6m.

Three days of rain interrupted work and it was done.

Lagom Bakery

Lagom is a Swedish and Norwegian word meaning "just the right amount".
The word can be variously translated as "in moderation", "in balance", "perfect-simple", and "suitable" (in matter of amounts).

The archetypical Swedish proverb "Lagom är bäst", literally "The right amount is best", is also translated as "Enough is as good as a feast", or as "There is virtue in moderation".

When the Lagom Bakery opened just 10 minutes drive to the north of us at Lake Burrill, we and most other locals wondered what the name meant.

They specialise in sourdough breads but also have a great selection of sweet and savoury goodies as well.

The co driver thinks their coffee is good too.

Our favourites are the jalapeño and cheese sourdough and the croissants. A crusty baguette to go with home made winter soups isn’t bad either.

It’s great that this and other diverse eating places are springing up around our town. We now have a Japanese and a Central American restaurant among the more conventional places eg. Australian, Chinese, Thai, Italian and Vietnamese.

The area is in the midst of a bit of real estate buying frenzy as monied ‘boomers’ sell their overpriced homes in Sydney (and Canberra) and move down the coast to retire with cash to spare. 

They need a little more dining out options than fish and chips, hamburgers and pies.

COVID-19/ Australia / Update 7th & 8th June

Victoria is reporting 11 new coronavirus cases in the 24 hours to midnight last night (6th June).
All new locally acquired cases today are linked to existing outbreaks. Eight are existing primary close contacts who were quarantining during their infectious period.
There are now 94 active cases across the state.

The lockdown in that state continues.

Update: 8th June

Victorian officials have finally linked the current mystery Delta variant outbreak to a returned traveller from hotel quarantine.
With assistance from the Doherty Institute, all known positive cases have been checked against the genomic sequencing for the cases in this cluster.
It was confirmed today that a match was found between a returned traveller who entered hotel quarantine in Melbourne on 8 May and this cluster.
Further investigations are underway to see if any contact can be established between the returned traveller and these families.
There’s currently no definitive understanding of where any transmission events may have occurred but all possibilities are being investigated from the plane to travel to the hotel.

COVID-19 / Australia / Update / 2nd & 4th June

The number of virus cases associated with the latest Victorian outbreak is now 60.

There were fears it had made its way into the aged care area again.

Just under 700 deaths of the total Australian 901 deaths to date have come from that sector.

From today’s figures it looks like that bullet may have been dodged however.*

Again, the Federal government is responsible for aged care administration in the country but has virtually done nothing to ensure that care workers and residents have received vaccination priority. 

The states have again stepped in to fill the void.

It also looks like the Victorian lockdown will be extended with the list of their exposure sites now over 500.

Of concern to us locally is that an infected Victorian visited our area, Jervis Bay, 40 minutes to the north 19th to 24th May.

The reason for the worry is because of the apparent highly contagious nature of this variant ie B.1.617.1 (Kappa).

Victorian authorities have spoken about how they are seeing more stranger to stranger transmission with this variant. It’s not just spending time with people which can spread the virus, it could be passing them in a small store.

We shall now be a little more careful with our exposure risk.

Both the co driver and I have had our first AZ shots with the second due for me at the end of the month and the co drivers end of July.

We both had our flu shots a few days ago.

* later this afternoon it was announced that two staff members and two residents of one facility have tested positive. It is interesting they have had the mandatory two doses of the Pfizer vaccine.
Update: 4th June
There had been a strange twist to the tale of the virus infection that has caused multiple people just north of us (see above) to get tested and self isolate.
Health authorities are yet to determine how a west Melbourne Victorian family who holidayed on the south coast of NSW contracted a strain of coronavirus not linked to any other local case amid concerns about the unknown source of the infection.
The strain – the more infectious Delta variant that originated in India – has been detected in the family of four who returned to Victoria from Jervis Bay, last week and is a different variant to the other cases in the Melbourne outbreak.

The family had tested positive to the Delta variant, known as B1.617.2, while other local cases in Victoria have been found to have the Kappa variant of the virus, known as B1.617.1.
It was “within the balance of possibility” that the family had acquired their infection in NSW during their holiday. It is a very significant concern as it has not been linked to any sequence cases across Australia from hotel quarantine or anywhere else.
But NSW Health said there was “no evidence whatsoever” the family caught COVID-19 while in NSW.
There are now 64 local coronavirus cases in Victoria.
Excluding the west Melbourne family and their close contacts, all other cases have been genomically linked to a man who completed hotel quarantine in Adelaide before returning to the city last month.
Strange indeed

Stay tuned!