Mods sorry but I`ve NOT seen this on the Covid thread.
Myself,wife and son are getting "paid" by the Office of National Statistics for taking part in the Government initiative of monthly home Covid Testings which are carried out on your doorstep.
We signed up and we EACH receive a one off "payment" of £50 followed by a monthly payment of £25 for a 12 month period.The monthly one is optional but hey why not as it gives us a yearly payment of £350 per person and gives us peace of mind,knowing we get monthly testing outcomes.
If you wonder why Ive place asterisks by the word "PAID" its because its given out in the form of High Street/Amazon Vouchers.
Anyone else signed up to the scheme ?
Employees were paid in Victoria that had no entitled paid leave and amount to stay at home and isolate until results were determined in the early stages about 8 days on average and a full 14 days if they tested positive.
An small incentive so to speak to attempt to reduce the spread.
Australia has many advantages not enjoyed by the likes of Great Britain that would mean by even doing nothing and living live as normal as it possible provided you kept the virus from very vulnerable people like aged care and disability care the death numbers from and with covid ( we will never know the real numbers ) would be extremely small much less than a very bad influenza season provided that social distancing and good hygene was followed by all.
As it was 900 died in a population of 25 million , 98 per cent of the land mass never recorded a single case and never will and the numbers in Victoria namely over 800 was only because of the inept and corrupt response from the Victorian Government which will eventually be subject to a Royal Commission.
Initial estimates when little was known about the virus put the death toll at around 30k in Australia if we did nothing but that proved to be a significant overreach.
A bit like the forecasts of the 1990's that said if we continued to burn coal in Australia we won't have any snow falling and our dams will be empty by the second decade of this century (LOL).
A bit like the computer systems that drive our energy grid will cease to operate in the year 2000 if we don't change the coding.
We now have no community transmission which will only regenerate if we don't quarantine overseas arrivals from countries that have community transmission.
We locked down Victoria and particularly Melbourne home to 5 million people for 120 days to get the numbers down from 700 cases per day to Nil.
80 people not in nursing homes died in Victoria that were in hospital before and during the 2nd lockdown.
We destroyed many ( 10's of thousands ) livelihoods and lives , made the CBD a ghost town which many businesses will never recover from crushed the flow of money from tenant to landlord , burdened the next 3 generations with mountains of debt and made most of the poor much poorer because we hired 5th rate security to look after hotel quarantine rather than using an under utilized police force and ADF to do the jobs they are often paid to do.
Personally my family is at least 100k worse off than we were before the political response to date and that will only increase over the short to medium term but we will never be compensated by government.
