Krapow Posted June 19, 2020 Share Posted June 19, 2020 Just now, lazarus said: Can't separate the two these days... Masks and social distancing are proven to stop the spread of COVID-19. Either you're social distancing to help curtail the spread of COVID-19, or you're not. Why not? Politics. No, you and a few other are using this thread which is about Covid 19 for a tit for tat petty political point scoring. Masks and social distancing are purely secondary to that, as you know! Be different if it was pertinent, but no, it's just usual back and forth shite that's making the thread unreadable. Stop being so fucking selfish and take it to the 100 or so other US Political threads started in the last few days. 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
lazarus Posted June 19, 2020 Share Posted June 19, 2020 (edited) 13 minutes ago, Krapow said: No, you and a few other are using this thread which is about Covid 19 for a tit for tat petty political point scoring. Masks and social distancing are purely secondary to that, as you know! Be different if it was pertinent, but no, it's just usual back and forth shite that's making the thread unreadable. Stop being so fucking selfish and take it to the 100 or so other US Political threads started in the last few days. No...the use of masks & social distancing are keys to survival. Compliance or non-compliance in the context of politics is relevant to some. Just maybe not to you. Coronavirus Live Updates: Tensions Grow Over Masks in the U.S. Tensions over face masks are growing in the United States, even as several states are seeing surges in coronavirus cases. Mask orders have become a point of point of political contention, with some regarding them as an essential safety measure and others considering them an unacceptable infringement of personal liberty. Gov. Gavin Newsom of California on Thursday ordered people to wear face masks in most indoor — and some outdoor — public settings. President Trump has eschewed masks in public. This week Gov. Doug Ducey of Arizona, which is also seeing record numbers of new daily cases, gave mayors the power to require wearing masks. Mr. Newsom’s guidance came as California reported more than 4,000 new cases on Wednesday, a new one-day record...https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/19/world/coronavirus-live-updates.html?action=click&module=Top Stories&pgtype=Homepage#link-2fffca6f Edited June 19, 2020 by lazarus Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Krapow Posted June 19, 2020 Share Posted June 19, 2020 1 minute ago, lazarus said: No...masks & social distancing are keys to survival. Coronavirus Live Updates: Tensions Grow Over Masks in the U.S. Tensions over face masks are growing in the United States, even as several states are seeing surges in coronavirus cases. Mask orders have become a point of point of political contention, with some regarding them as an essential safety measure and others considering them an unacceptable infringement of personal liberty. Gov. Gavin Newsom of California on Thursday ordered people to wear face masks in most indoor — and some outdoor — public settings. President Trump has eschewed masks in public. This week Gov. Doug Ducey of Arizona, which is also seeing record numbers of new daily cases, gave mayors the power to require wearing masks. Mr. Newsom’s guidance came as California reported more than 4,000 new cases on Wednesday, a new one-day record...https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/19/world/coronavirus-live-updates.html?action=click&module=Top Stories&pgtype=Homepage#link-2fffca6f Stop insulting my intelligence. If it was objective about masks and social distancing, that would be different. But it's not, all it is from you and a few others is an excuse to push your political viewpoints and try to point score against eachother, nothing else. As you well know! There's a section for politics, a multitude of threads currently on it. Stop fucking ruining this one with incessant US Politics shite. You and a few others. 3 2 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
lazarus Posted June 19, 2020 Share Posted June 19, 2020 (edited) 13 minutes ago, Krapow said: Stop insulting my intelligence. If it was objective about masks and social distancing, that would be different. But it's not, all it is from you and a few others is an excuse to push your political viewpoints and try to point score against eachother, nothing else. As you well know! There's a section for politics, a multitude of threads currently on it. Stop fucking ruining this one with incessant US Politics shite. You and a few others. The point has been made on this thread and others that people are not practicing "good' COVID-19 behavior while out & about protesting (politically) for one thing or another. Examples of this are definitely germane to the COVID discussion. Is there overlap? Yes. Personally, I think that the COVID response in the US has been hijacked by politics and over 120,000 people have already died with a lot more on the way. Don't think its connected? Then don't read it. Simple as that. That's the intelligent thing to do. Nice to read that your favorite shops are reopening and your part of London is relatively COVID free, though. Carry on... Edited June 19, 2020 by lazarus Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Krapow Posted June 19, 2020 Share Posted June 19, 2020 Just now, lazarus said: The point has been made on this thread and others that people are not practicing "good' COVID-19 behavior while out & about protesting (politically) for one thing or another. Examples of this are definitely germane to the COVID discussion. Is there overlap? Yes. Personally, I think that the COVID response in the US has been hijacked by politics and over 120,000 people have already died with a lot more on the way. Don't think its connected? Then don't read it. Simple as that. That's the intelligent thing to do. Nice to read that your favorite shops are reopening and your part of London is relatively COVID free, though. Carry on... No, you know exactly what you're doing and why, as do others, it's nothing else but petty Political point scoring. It's getting incessant on this thread, and will probably lead to it being closed. But aye, carry on ... 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Nightcrawler Posted June 19, 2020 Share Posted June 19, 2020 Fellas Krapow makes a reasonable point and reading the last couple of pages, I can see politics creeping in to main body of the forum. Anyone is free to join the political club if that is their cup of tea but generally those who don't, do not have to see or read them For instance if a member of the Politics club wanted to start a topic called "Covid 19" or such like, then that's fine I appreciate that there are political aspects of C19 but we don't need the topic to be saturated with arguments as to who is responsible, does it exist etc. So I would encourage you to give a bit of thought before posting. We are reluctant to move or hide posts unless they are against forum rules, but that may happen in cases like this, to keep the thread mainstream. Thankyou 6 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
fforest Posted June 19, 2020 Share Posted June 19, 2020 3 hours ago, Nightcrawler said: Fellas Krapow makes a reasonable point and reading the last couple of pages, I can see politics creeping in to main body of the forum. Anyone is free to join the political club if that is their cup of tea but generally those who don't, do not have to see or read them For instance if a member of the Politics club wanted to start a topic called "Covid 19" or such like, then that's fine I appreciate that there are political aspects of C19 but we don't need the topic to be saturated with arguments as to who is responsible, does it exist etc. So I would encourage you to give a bit of thought before posting. We are reluctant to move or hide posts unless they are against forum rules, but that may happen in cases like this, to keep the thread mainstream. Thankyou Well just about all the moderating on this forum is very fair in my opinion.........The old secrets forum was also very fair to I thought.... The problem with Covid is its not just a isolated virus but has tie-ins with a bunch of other things like...Masks, Contact tracing, Vaccines, microchips, lockdowns, unemployment, flight bans, social distancing, temp guns, loss of freedoms etc etc etc ....... But I have to say you-all have done a pretty good job letting the subject run a little as it needs and pulling it back only when necessary.... 3 2 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Krapow Posted June 19, 2020 Share Posted June 19, 2020 6 hours ago, Nightcrawler said: Fellas Krapow makes a reasonable point and reading the last couple of pages, I can see politics creeping in to main body of the forum. Anyone is free to join the political club if that is their cup of tea but generally those who don't, do not have to see or read them For instance if a member of the Politics club wanted to start a topic called "Covid 19" or such like, then that's fine I appreciate that there are political aspects of C19 but we don't need the topic to be saturated with arguments as to who is responsible, does it exist etc. So I would encourage you to give a bit of thought before posting. We are reluctant to move or hide posts unless they are against forum rules, but that may happen in cases like this, to keep the thread mainstream. Thankyou Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Kathmandu Posted June 19, 2020 Share Posted June 19, 2020 On 6/18/2020 at 10:45 AM, fatbhoytim said: This coronavirus is the strangest virus I've ever heard of. It's very dangerous the way it spreads. It is so mysterious the way it lurks in schools, but then dies at B&Q. It is sneaky. It can spread when buying clothes at M&S but not at Tesco. It is non-alcoholic. It can't spread when you are buying beer. It lives for two days on Amazon boxes, you must wait 48 hours to touch them but It can't survive on takeaway coffee cups, so enjoying a hot cup of costa is safe. It is the most curious thing, how it lives on footballs, ballet bars, even loo seats but dies on WWE ropes. It is spread by hair stylists, dog groomers, and dentists, but not by bank tellers, cashiers, and fast food workers. It's so smart. It won’t bother the first 10 people but it knows when the 11th person shows up so be careful if that’s you. It even knows what you want vs what you need. If you want a massage or your nails done it is very actively on the prowl and not even a mask can stop it but If you need a plumber, it is weak, and a mask will keep it away. It won't affect you in a taxi, but your not allowed to take people in your car. It also seems to be most dangerous after 5:30pm so businesses must start to close before the virus comes out and wreaks havoc upon the populations. Whoever heard of such a smart sneaky virus?!? 19 hours ago, Ivan the terrible said: brilliant Hardly original though. https://www.facebook.com/698276630188936/posts/bloody-thingthis-coronavirus-is-the-strangest-virus-ive-ever-heard-of-its-very-d/3749179325098636/ Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ivan the terrible Posted June 19, 2020 Share Posted June 19, 2020 3 hours ago, Kathmandu said: Hardly original though. https://www.facebook.com/698276630188936/posts/bloody-thingthis-coronavirus-is-the-strangest-virus-ive-ever-heard-of-its-very-d/3749179325098636/ who cares its still bloody good...thanks fbt for posting Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
fygjam Posted June 20, 2020 Share Posted June 20, 2020 Well this is interesting, along with the "French patient". Italy sewage study suggests COVID-19 was there in December 2019 Coronavirus traces have been discovered in wastewater collected from Italy in December 2019, weeks before China reported its first cases. The Italian National Institute of Health looked at 40 sewage samples collected from wastewater treatment plants in northern Italy between October 2019 and February 2020. An analysis released on Thursday said samples taken in Milan and Turin on December 18 showed the presence of the SARS-Cov-2 virus. https://www.news.com.au/world/coronavirus/global/italy-sewage-study-suggests-covid19-was-there-in-december-2019/news-story/2fd865f7b12a33698f3e9ab2f15a35e3 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Bazle Posted June 20, 2020 Share Posted June 20, 2020 1 hour ago, fygjam said: Well this is interesting, along with the "French patient". Italy sewage study suggests COVID-19 was there in December 2019 https://www.news.com.au/world/coronavirus/global/italy-sewage-study-suggests-covid19-was-there-in-december-2019/news-story/2fd865f7b12a33698f3e9ab2f15a35e3 Perhaps this has something to do with the large number of Chinese migrant workers that there were in Northern Italy. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ivan the terrible Posted June 20, 2020 Share Posted June 20, 2020 Cases in Victoria ,Australia start to climb ..2weeks after the BLM rallies tougher restriction from 12mnight tomorrow Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
fatbhoytim Posted June 20, 2020 Share Posted June 20, 2020 I have just checked my phone after seeing this --- bastards have installed it without notification. Big Brother is watching right enough............ 1 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ivan the terrible Posted June 20, 2020 Share Posted June 20, 2020 (edited) 9 minutes ago, fatbhoytim said: I have just checked my phone after seeing this --- bastards have installed it without notification. Big Brother is watching right enough............ sorted Edited June 20, 2020 by Ivan the terrible Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
KhunDon Posted June 20, 2020 Share Posted June 20, 2020 Yup it’s on my IPhone as well. Sneaky bastards. 🤔 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
fatbhoytim Posted June 20, 2020 Share Posted June 20, 2020 13 hours ago, Kathmandu said: Hardly original though. https://www.facebook.com/698276630188936/posts/bloody-thingthis-coronavirus-is-the-strangest-virus-ive-ever-heard-of-its-very-d/3749179325098636/ I thought I would post a light hearted look at the circumstances under which we are constrained by this virus. No, it was not original,and yes it did come from a facebook post a friend sent, but silly me thought this just might be relevant in the covid-19 thread. Seems I am mistaken by not posting something totally original. It may not have been "hardly original" but a lot of guys obviously had never seen it judging by the amount of likes the post got. I await with bated breath for you to chastise everyone else who has the temerity to post a copy-and-paste from any other source. Also, for your information, the photo above I posted is hardly original either, as it comes from the same source. 2 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ivan the terrible Posted June 20, 2020 Share Posted June 20, 2020 21 hours ago, Nightcrawler said: Fellas Krapow makes a reasonable point and reading the last couple of pages, I can see politics creeping in to main body of the forum. Anyone is free to join the political club if that is their cup of tea but generally those who don't, do not have to see or read them For instance if a member of the Politics club wanted to start a topic called "Covid 19" or such like, then that's fine I appreciate that there are political aspects of C19 but we don't need the topic to be saturated with arguments as to who is responsible, does it exist etc. So I would encourage you to give a bit of thought before posting. We are reluctant to move or hide posts unless they are against forum rules, but that may happen in cases like this, to keep the thread mainstream. Thankyou good post Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
forcebwithu Posted June 20, 2020 Share Posted June 20, 2020 (edited) 27 minutes ago, fatbhoytim said: I have just checked my phone after seeing this --- bastards have installed it without notification. Big Brother is watching right enough............ Not quite as sinister as this would make it seem, at least on Android phones. Had a look on my phone and see under Services "COVID-19 Exposure Notifications". Clicking on that you can see two things have to happen for the service to work. One, you need to turn bluetooth on, and the second, most important one is this, "To turn on COVID-19 Exposure Notifications, install or finish setting up a participating app". So no tracking apps were automatically installed, just the framework for one offered by Google. Edited June 20, 2020 by forcebwithu 5 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
galenkia Posted June 20, 2020 Share Posted June 20, 2020 1 hour ago, Ivan the terrible said: Cases in Victoria ,Australia start to climb ..2weeks after the BLM rallies tougher restriction from 12mnight tomorrow People will never learn. Same will happen here because of the pricks in London. Takes a small minority to f**k it up for the majority. 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ivan the terrible Posted June 20, 2020 Share Posted June 20, 2020 Covid heroes good read HOME THE NATION WORLD BUSINESS COMMENTARY SPORT ARTS All HOME WEEKEND AUSTRALIAN MAGAZINE Facebook Twitter Email Print Save ‘My cheese sandwich was cold’ Armed only with a laptop, scholar Simon Quinn did what his own government couldn’t, evacuating 2000 Australians trapped in India over COVID. Then the whingeing started. By RICHARD GUILLIATT Simon Quinn in lockdown near Delhi. Picture: supplied From The Weekend Australian Magazine June 20, 2020 14 MINUTE READ 79 If you were looking for the ideal person to orchestrate an airlift of 2000 people trapped in a foreign country during a lethal pandemic, Simon Quinn might not be your first choice. Quinn is a mild-mannered, bespectacled 32-year-old Sanskrit scholar from Sydney who lives in a tiny one-bedroom house outside New Delhi and teaches English on the side – which is to say, international crisis management is not his usual thing. Then again, 2020 has been that kind of year – the kind of year in which one man armed only with a laptop, a Facebook account and inexhaustible patience can pull off an emergency mass evacuation that proved beyond the capabilities of his own government. Quinn still sounds bemused by it all, like a man who’s passed through a cyclone and can’t quite remember the details. Even now – after five planeloads of people have been safely spirited out of India; after he’s been hailed on Facebook as a hero, a saviour and the human embodiment of God’s shining light – he’s not exactly sure how to sum up the whole mad enterprise. “It has,” he says, “been a weird experience.” Like so many weird experiences these days, it started on the internet. On March 24 Quinn was at home in Gurgaon, 30km southwest of Delhi, when the Indian government announced a sudden and draconian nationwide lockdown to halt the spread of COVID-19 among the country’s 1.38 billion people. On his laptop, he logged into a chat forum for Australians travelling in India; anxious messages scrolled across his screen. All regular airline flights into and out of India had been stopped, which meant more than 6000 Australians – tourists and Indian-Australians visiting family – were stuck with no exit plan as television news reports spoke of possible food shortages and showed Indian police beating people in the streets. READ NEXT NRL WARRIORS Kearney sacked after loss MATT ENCARNACION Quinn himself was calm – he’d been living in India since 2017, having moved there after studying Sanskrit at the Australian National University in Canberra. Semi-fluent in Hindi and married to a local, he is also one of those people who seems constitutionally incapable of panic. For many Australians, however, the situation felt genuinely desperate: some were running out of medications; some had flu-like symptoms and were stuck in hospitals without food awaiting Covid test results; others were effectively homeless as hostels shut down and hotels refused to take them. Families travelling with elderly, wheelchair-bound relatives were anxious to get them home to safety. “It became apparent that a lot of foreigners were seriously suffering here because of the lockdown,” Quinn recalls. So he launched an open-access spreadsheet on WhatsApp for them to register their details; within a week, more than 1000 people had joined up and he’d become the de facto administrator of a crisis line, assisted by half a dozen other expats scattered around India. People were desperate to know when the Australian government would send charter flights to get its citizens out of India – something the US, UK, Germany, France, Ireland and Canada had already done. But Australia’s High Commissioner to India, former NSW premier Barry O’Farrell – newly arrived in Delhi and only weeks into his job – was posting videos on Twitter that recommended patience and spoke vaguely about efforts being made. On March 28, Quinn created a Facebook page called Australians Stuck In India and began orchestrating a media and lobbying campaign to pressure the Australian government, posting a template email for people to send to consular officials. This was “basically a stupid thing to do”, he admits now; he hadn’t realised the High Commission in Delhi was operating on a skeleton staff, having lost 90 per cent of its support workers due to the lockdown. Now it was being bombarded with up to 1000 inquiries a day. “So the deputy [head of mission] called me and said: ‘Please take that down from your page’,” he recalls. Quinn gleaned that Australia’s efforts to organise repatriation flights were floundering because neither Qantas nor Virgin flies direct to India (they use partner airlines), and negotiations with other operators were proving difficult. Then he found out that a firm in Brisbane, Monarc Global, was offering to help rescue stranded Australians. Brendon Hempel. Picture: Josh Robenstone Monarc Global doesn’t actually own any planes – it operates an internet booking system for charter flights. But its enterprising owner, an expat Canadian pilot named Royce Crown, had spotted news reports about Aussies stranded overseas and announced on his website that he was ready to help. Quinn spoke to Crown, who directed him to Melbourne charter company Stratos Group Aviation, run by another pilot-turned-entrepreneur, Brendon Hempel. Which is how Simon Quinn found himself discussing aviation logistics with Hempel one night over WhatsApp. “I don’t really understand the technical stuff,” Quinn admits. “But Brendon Hempel and Royce Crown had been flying medical supplies in from China, and I asked Brendon: ‘Would it be possible to do this with humans?’ ” Hempel, who mistakenly thought Quinn worked for the Australian government, threw himself into the task of costing the flights. “I thought Simon was in some sort of diplomatic or political role working for the consulate,” he recalls. “I wasn’t clear how he fit into the whole thing until about a week or two in. It turned out he wasn’t benefiting financially, nor did he have any duty-of-care obligation toward the passengers, which seemed amazing to me. He’s just an average Joe with a Facebook account who was talking to the High Commission.” Hempel contacted the Indonesian airline Lion Air, which flies regularly to India, and worked out that renting an Airbus A330 with a full crew for a Delhi-to-Melbourne run would cost around $650,000 – paid upfront. If anything went wrong, or not enough seats were filled, his company would wear the loss. He was mulling this over one night when someone posted a video on his WhatsApp stream showing an Australian tourist trapped in a Delhi hotel room, running out of food, with a sign stuck to his door identifying him as a foreigner. “I think it was 11 o’clock at night and I’d had one or two red wines,” Hempel recalls, “and I thought: ‘Bugger it, let’s do this’. Whether we recouped the money or not, it was a genuinely scary situation that people were in.” Royce Crown. Picture: Justine Walpole In Brisbane, Royce Crown had calculated that $2200 a ticket would probably get them above break-even if they filled a plane, so he and Hempel began making plans for two initial Delhi to Melbourne flights on April 10 and 16. There was one major snag with this plan: Crown’s firm, Monarc Global, did not have a passenger ticketing system because it deals mainly with freight charter flights. “I had 15 of my staff developing a ticketing system, along with a cancellation and complaints department,” Crown recalls. “It was almost like running an airline.” In Delhi, meanwhile, Quinn was beginning to sense that the Australian foreign affairs officials, who were being flayed on social media, might be willing to lend his efforts a hand. Why Australia took so long to organise repatriation flights out of India is a subject the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade declines to answer, but it appears to be a story of red tape and poor planning. Whatever contingency plans the Australian government had devised for a global pandemic, it apparently failed to account for the fact that Qantas and Virgin do not fly to India, and reconfiguring Delhi Airport to process their planes would be difficultgiven that India’s civil aviation systems were effectively shut down. Nor were Australian airline staff and their unions enthusiastic for the flights after 11 Qantas cabin crew contracted coronavirus on a repatriation flight from Chile. Air India staff had likewise been infected while carrying passengers from the US, and negotiations with that airline also bogged down because its crew costs were prohibitive. Quinn came to sympathise with High Commission staff in Delhi, who were copping much of the abuse over this imbroglio. “Some of that criticism may be warranted,” he says. “But I think it should be more directed towards Canberra, because the Australian government at large handled this issue very poorly.” It was around this time that senior staff in the High Commission began to consider the unlikely scenario that their saviour from this nightmare might be an obscure expat Sanskrit PhD student living in the suburbs of Gurgaon. “Here’s a guy who’s never been involved in anything like this, and he’s contacting charter aircraft companies and telling us he thinks he has the passenger numbers,” recalls a High Commission staffer. “Over the course of a week we began to realise, ‘Hey, he might actually pull this off’.” Although Lion Air flew regularly to India and was already logged into its airport system, Quinn still needed Indian government approval at the highest level. At the Australian end, he needed both state and federal government approval to get his planes into Melbourne airport and the passengers checked through immigration and shepherded to their quarantine hotels. Lion Air had committed to the flights, and the Australian government might well have taken control of the operation if not for the airline’s safety record, which had taken a hit in 2018 when one of its Boeing 737s crashed in Indonesia, killing 189 people. Quinn surmised that the government would help him as long as it didn’t have to wear responsibility for the flights. So behind the scenes, Australian foreign affairs officials began smoothing his path with Indian aviation authorities and linking their computers to Monarc’s makeshift ticketing system. In Delhi, High Commission staff collected details of the passengers to pass them on to Indian officials so police roadblocks would permit them passage to the airport. On April 8, only two days before Lion Air’s firstplane was due to leave Delhi, Quinn posted a notice on the Facebook page: “We, a small group of Australians stuck in India, are now arranging charter flights from India to Australia. The Australian High Commission, the Department of Foreign Affairs and the Department of Home Affairs are aware of this and we are in direct contact with all three.” The post provided links to carefully worded documents he and his team had prepared on ticketing arrangements, ground transport, baggage and other contingencies. By the following day all 444 seats had sold, which would have been a cause for celebration were it not for the fact that the Easter holiday meant most of the money would not arrive for days and Hempel was faced with using his own bank account to pay Lion Air $1.3 million. “Yeah, quite a risk – not something we would do, ordinarily,” comments Hempel, who recalls feeling somewhat stressed as he sat in his office and pushed the button on the transfer. “But our first objective was getting the airplanes, and then hopefully we can fill them with enough bums.” By now Quinn’s Facebook page had blossomed into a teeming human multitude congregating inside different subject threads, each a cacophony of questions. Quinn was getting two to three hours’ sleep a night, chained to his laptop the rest of the time as he posted long, lucid explanatory edicts while slogging through a blizzard of anxious inquiries from passengers and wannabe-passengers. Will the plane have vegetarian food? What if my visa has expired? Can I check in more than one bag? Will the plane have vegetarian food? Are any of the passengers suffering coronavirus? Can I smoke on the balcony of my quarantine hotel in Melbourne? Will the plane have vegetarian food? “Simon’s an interesting guy – a typically relentless, task-orientated male,” laughs Hempel. “He was a man possessed, and I’m not sure exactly why.” Staff inside the High Commission were following it all with a certain sense of wonder. “I don’t know when the guy slept, he seemed to be answering questions at all hours,” says one. “We have teams of people trained and paid to do this kind of work; he’s a guy who took on the job voluntarily, dealing with people who were incredibly anxious, sometimes angry. We just really admired his ability to deal with it all.” Quinn does recall that his hair began falling in a steady stream onto his computer keyboard but is otherwise heroically understated. “I was in lockdown anyway, so I didn’t have much going on. Once I started it, I felt like I had a responsibility.” The first flight was an exercise in chaos: departure was pushed back a day due to airport issues, so tickets had to be reissued; passengers turned up at the airport with absurd amounts of luggage and tickets with misspelt names; people trying to reach Delhi were calling in from roadblocks where they were being detained. A woman with leukaemia, desperate to get home for chemotherapy, contacted Hempel on WhatsApp late one night from just outside Delhi. “It was three hours before she was due to be picked up and there was a herd of elephants on the only approach road into town. She said, ‘Brendon, what do I do?’ By this stage it’s 2am in Melbourne and I was a bit delirious with exhaustion so I suggested she message me the elephants’ WhatsApp details and I’d talk to them.” Against all odds, every passenger made it onto the plane, where Lion Air cabin crew greeted them dressed in hazmat suits, masks and goggles. Departure was delayed for eight hours because of Customs, the plane was packed to the gills, there were 35 cranky children aboard and the in-flight meal was by all reports not Michelin quality, but photos taken inside the aircraft show a jubilantly happy group of passengers arriving in Melbourne 30 hours later. “For about 24 hours, I was in bliss,” recalls Royce Crown. Then came the backlash. In a spirit of generosity he came to regret, Crown had told passengers that if the planes were filled to capacity and all costs were covered, Monarc might pay partial refunds. By the time the second Lion Air flight left Delhi on April 16, he realised his fuel and airport costs were far higher than expected and hastily put an end to that offer. But some people began demanding refunds within hours of arriving at their quarantine hotels, then grumbled on Facebook when the money was not immediately sent. Others seemed to assume Monarc had put on the flights as a money-making exercise and griped that Lion Air did not provide children’s meals, that the entertainment system on the plane hadn’t functioned or that the view from the hotel room in Melbourne was terrible. “We got a few compliments, which was really nice, but they were few and far between,” Crown recalls. “Anything that went wrong – any delays, complaints about luggage – we got hit with it. One of our girls was in tears twice a day because of being yelled at. We were told what a horrible company we were, how could we do this? It took a toll.” “We were all in different time zones,” says Hempel, “so I’d catch a few hours’ sleep and wake up to a mountain of WhatsApp messages, thinking: ‘What’s happened – have we lost a plane?’ No, it’s just a cold cheese sandwich in Row 32.” Quinn and his team, frantically trying to organise flights out of Chennai and Mumbai in India’s south, were deeply aggrieved by the social media speculation that they were profiteering. The rumours probably weren’t helped by an SBS report that falsely claimed the rescue operation was being “spearheaded” by Jagvinder Singh Virk, a Sydney property developer and businessman. Virk, whose strong Liberal Party connections make him a contentious figure in Australia’s Sikh community, had popped up on the Facebook page early on, offering video explainers in Hindi and help via his Liberal Party and Indian government contacts. By mid-April he was granting interviews and being hailed as a hero in Indian media. “He kind of just appeared one day,” laughs Quinn, who appreciated Virk’s help in contacting Indian authorities but found himself caught in the crossfire of Liberal/Labor Sikh politics for a while. The whingeing on Facebook eventually became too much even for Quinn, who abandoned his imperturbable patience to deliver a few memorable rebukes. “I’m sorry to hear about your hellish experience,” he told one unhappy customer. “Unfortunately, I believe your ordeal might continue in your taxpayer-funded five-star hotel room, as I am hearing awful incidents of people being delivered undercooked peas and there being excessive dust behind lamps.” On April 19 and 20, three more Lion Air jets left India bearing Australian passengers, the final flights from Mumbai and Chennai being redirected to Adelaide at the last minute in one final moment of chaos. Five planes had brought 2013 people home and Quinn’s team was ready to arrange more, but the Australian government was now determined to organise its own flights, if only to save face. On April 23, it announced it had put on Qatar Airways and Qantas flights out of India, and Quinn’s team decided its work was done. In the wash-up, Royce Crown estimates his firm Monarc Global lost about $50,000 on the enterprise after paying a $51 refund to everyone on the first flight; Brendon Hempel’s Stratos Aviation made a small profit after paying a $200 rebate to seniors and children under 10. Simon Quinn received absolutely no material reward, although one female passenger did suggest they get married and scores of people took to Facebook to shower him with praise and adulation. As late as a few weeks ago, he was still extricating himself from his role as saviour and shining light, as Australians still stuck in India bombarded him with questions about government repatriation flights in the mistaken belief he was organising them. “I had to give up my own life and routine for about six weeks but, all in all, I made some lifelong friends and met some fascinating characters,” he says. “I guess it was a privilege, really, to help that many people.” Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
From The Weekend Australian Magazine June 20, 2020 14 MINUTE READ 79 If you were looking for the ideal person to orchestrate an airlift of 2000 people trapped in a foreign country during a lethal pandemic, Simon Quinn might not be your first choice. Quinn is a mild-mannered, bespectacled 32-year-old Sanskrit scholar from Sydney who lives in a tiny one-bedroom house outside New Delhi and teaches English on the side – which is to say, international crisis management is not his usual thing. Then again, 2020 has been that kind of year – the kind of year in which one man armed only with a laptop, a Facebook account and inexhaustible patience can pull off an emergency mass evacuation that proved beyond the capabilities of his own government. Quinn still sounds bemused by it all, like a man who’s passed through a cyclone and can’t quite remember the details. Even now – after five planeloads of people have been safely spirited out of India; after he’s been hailed on Facebook as a hero, a saviour and the human embodiment of God’s shining light – he’s not exactly sure how to sum up the whole mad enterprise. “It has,” he says, “been a weird experience.” Like so many weird experiences these days, it started on the internet. On March 24 Quinn was at home in Gurgaon, 30km southwest of Delhi, when the Indian government announced a sudden and draconian nationwide lockdown to halt the spread of COVID-19 among the country’s 1.38 billion people. On his laptop, he logged into a chat forum for Australians travelling in India; anxious messages scrolled across his screen. All regular airline flights into and out of India had been stopped, which meant more than 6000 Australians – tourists and Indian-Australians visiting family – were stuck with no exit plan as television news reports spoke of possible food shortages and showed Indian police beating people in the streets. READ NEXT NRL WARRIORS Kearney sacked after loss MATT ENCARNACION Quinn himself was calm – he’d been living in India since 2017, having moved there after studying Sanskrit at the Australian National University in Canberra. Semi-fluent in Hindi and married to a local, he is also one of those people who seems constitutionally incapable of panic. For many Australians, however, the situation felt genuinely desperate: some were running out of medications; some had flu-like symptoms and were stuck in hospitals without food awaiting Covid test results; others were effectively homeless as hostels shut down and hotels refused to take them. Families travelling with elderly, wheelchair-bound relatives were anxious to get them home to safety. “It became apparent that a lot of foreigners were seriously suffering here because of the lockdown,” Quinn recalls. So he launched an open-access spreadsheet on WhatsApp for them to register their details; within a week, more than 1000 people had joined up and he’d become the de facto administrator of a crisis line, assisted by half a dozen other expats scattered around India. People were desperate to know when the Australian government would send charter flights to get its citizens out of India – something the US, UK, Germany, France, Ireland and Canada had already done. But Australia’s High Commissioner to India, former NSW premier Barry O’Farrell – newly arrived in Delhi and only weeks into his job – was posting videos on Twitter that recommended patience and spoke vaguely about efforts being made. On March 28, Quinn created a Facebook page called Australians Stuck In India and began orchestrating a media and lobbying campaign to pressure the Australian government, posting a template email for people to send to consular officials. This was “basically a stupid thing to do”, he admits now; he hadn’t realised the High Commission in Delhi was operating on a skeleton staff, having lost 90 per cent of its support workers due to the lockdown. Now it was being bombarded with up to 1000 inquiries a day. “So the deputy [head of mission] called me and said: ‘Please take that down from your page’,” he recalls. Quinn gleaned that Australia’s efforts to organise repatriation flights were floundering because neither Qantas nor Virgin flies direct to India (they use partner airlines), and negotiations with other operators were proving difficult. Then he found out that a firm in Brisbane, Monarc Global, was offering to help rescue stranded Australians. Brendon Hempel. Picture: Josh Robenstone Monarc Global doesn’t actually own any planes – it operates an internet booking system for charter flights. But its enterprising owner, an expat Canadian pilot named Royce Crown, had spotted news reports about Aussies stranded overseas and announced on his website that he was ready to help. Quinn spoke to Crown, who directed him to Melbourne charter company Stratos Group Aviation, run by another pilot-turned-entrepreneur, Brendon Hempel. Which is how Simon Quinn found himself discussing aviation logistics with Hempel one night over WhatsApp. “I don’t really understand the technical stuff,” Quinn admits. “But Brendon Hempel and Royce Crown had been flying medical supplies in from China, and I asked Brendon: ‘Would it be possible to do this with humans?’ ” Hempel, who mistakenly thought Quinn worked for the Australian government, threw himself into the task of costing the flights. “I thought Simon was in some sort of diplomatic or political role working for the consulate,” he recalls. “I wasn’t clear how he fit into the whole thing until about a week or two in. It turned out he wasn’t benefiting financially, nor did he have any duty-of-care obligation toward the passengers, which seemed amazing to me. He’s just an average Joe with a Facebook account who was talking to the High Commission.” Hempel contacted the Indonesian airline Lion Air, which flies regularly to India, and worked out that renting an Airbus A330 with a full crew for a Delhi-to-Melbourne run would cost around $650,000 – paid upfront. If anything went wrong, or not enough seats were filled, his company would wear the loss. He was mulling this over one night when someone posted a video on his WhatsApp stream showing an Australian tourist trapped in a Delhi hotel room, running out of food, with a sign stuck to his door identifying him as a foreigner. “I think it was 11 o’clock at night and I’d had one or two red wines,” Hempel recalls, “and I thought: ‘Bugger it, let’s do this’. Whether we recouped the money or not, it was a genuinely scary situation that people were in.” Royce Crown. Picture: Justine Walpole In Brisbane, Royce Crown had calculated that $2200 a ticket would probably get them above break-even if they filled a plane, so he and Hempel began making plans for two initial Delhi to Melbourne flights on April 10 and 16. There was one major snag with this plan: Crown’s firm, Monarc Global, did not have a passenger ticketing system because it deals mainly with freight charter flights. “I had 15 of my staff developing a ticketing system, along with a cancellation and complaints department,” Crown recalls. “It was almost like running an airline.” In Delhi, meanwhile, Quinn was beginning to sense that the Australian foreign affairs officials, who were being flayed on social media, might be willing to lend his efforts a hand. Why Australia took so long to organise repatriation flights out of India is a subject the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade declines to answer, but it appears to be a story of red tape and poor planning. Whatever contingency plans the Australian government had devised for a global pandemic, it apparently failed to account for the fact that Qantas and Virgin do not fly to India, and reconfiguring Delhi Airport to process their planes would be difficultgiven that India’s civil aviation systems were effectively shut down. Nor were Australian airline staff and their unions enthusiastic for the flights after 11 Qantas cabin crew contracted coronavirus on a repatriation flight from Chile. Air India staff had likewise been infected while carrying passengers from the US, and negotiations with that airline also bogged down because its crew costs were prohibitive. Quinn came to sympathise with High Commission staff in Delhi, who were copping much of the abuse over this imbroglio. “Some of that criticism may be warranted,” he says. “But I think it should be more directed towards Canberra, because the Australian government at large handled this issue very poorly.” It was around this time that senior staff in the High Commission began to consider the unlikely scenario that their saviour from this nightmare might be an obscure expat Sanskrit PhD student living in the suburbs of Gurgaon. “Here’s a guy who’s never been involved in anything like this, and he’s contacting charter aircraft companies and telling us he thinks he has the passenger numbers,” recalls a High Commission staffer. “Over the course of a week we began to realise, ‘Hey, he might actually pull this off’.” Although Lion Air flew regularly to India and was already logged into its airport system, Quinn still needed Indian government approval at the highest level. At the Australian end, he needed both state and federal government approval to get his planes into Melbourne airport and the passengers checked through immigration and shepherded to their quarantine hotels. Lion Air had committed to the flights, and the Australian government might well have taken control of the operation if not for the airline’s safety record, which had taken a hit in 2018 when one of its Boeing 737s crashed in Indonesia, killing 189 people. Quinn surmised that the government would help him as long as it didn’t have to wear responsibility for the flights. So behind the scenes, Australian foreign affairs officials began smoothing his path with Indian aviation authorities and linking their computers to Monarc’s makeshift ticketing system. In Delhi, High Commission staff collected details of the passengers to pass them on to Indian officials so police roadblocks would permit them passage to the airport. On April 8, only two days before Lion Air’s firstplane was due to leave Delhi, Quinn posted a notice on the Facebook page: “We, a small group of Australians stuck in India, are now arranging charter flights from India to Australia. The Australian High Commission, the Department of Foreign Affairs and the Department of Home Affairs are aware of this and we are in direct contact with all three.” The post provided links to carefully worded documents he and his team had prepared on ticketing arrangements, ground transport, baggage and other contingencies. By the following day all 444 seats had sold, which would have been a cause for celebration were it not for the fact that the Easter holiday meant most of the money would not arrive for days and Hempel was faced with using his own bank account to pay Lion Air $1.3 million. “Yeah, quite a risk – not something we would do, ordinarily,” comments Hempel, who recalls feeling somewhat stressed as he sat in his office and pushed the button on the transfer. “But our first objective was getting the airplanes, and then hopefully we can fill them with enough bums.” By now Quinn’s Facebook page had blossomed into a teeming human multitude congregating inside different subject threads, each a cacophony of questions. Quinn was getting two to three hours’ sleep a night, chained to his laptop the rest of the time as he posted long, lucid explanatory edicts while slogging through a blizzard of anxious inquiries from passengers and wannabe-passengers. Will the plane have vegetarian food? What if my visa has expired? Can I check in more than one bag? Will the plane have vegetarian food? Are any of the passengers suffering coronavirus? Can I smoke on the balcony of my quarantine hotel in Melbourne? Will the plane have vegetarian food? “Simon’s an interesting guy – a typically relentless, task-orientated male,” laughs Hempel. “He was a man possessed, and I’m not sure exactly why.” Staff inside the High Commission were following it all with a certain sense of wonder. “I don’t know when the guy slept, he seemed to be answering questions at all hours,” says one. “We have teams of people trained and paid to do this kind of work; he’s a guy who took on the job voluntarily, dealing with people who were incredibly anxious, sometimes angry. We just really admired his ability to deal with it all.” Quinn does recall that his hair began falling in a steady stream onto his computer keyboard but is otherwise heroically understated. “I was in lockdown anyway, so I didn’t have much going on. Once I started it, I felt like I had a responsibility.” The first flight was an exercise in chaos: departure was pushed back a day due to airport issues, so tickets had to be reissued; passengers turned up at the airport with absurd amounts of luggage and tickets with misspelt names; people trying to reach Delhi were calling in from roadblocks where they were being detained. A woman with leukaemia, desperate to get home for chemotherapy, contacted Hempel on WhatsApp late one night from just outside Delhi. “It was three hours before she was due to be picked up and there was a herd of elephants on the only approach road into town. She said, ‘Brendon, what do I do?’ By this stage it’s 2am in Melbourne and I was a bit delirious with exhaustion so I suggested she message me the elephants’ WhatsApp details and I’d talk to them.” Against all odds, every passenger made it onto the plane, where Lion Air cabin crew greeted them dressed in hazmat suits, masks and goggles. Departure was delayed for eight hours because of Customs, the plane was packed to the gills, there were 35 cranky children aboard and the in-flight meal was by all reports not Michelin quality, but photos taken inside the aircraft show a jubilantly happy group of passengers arriving in Melbourne 30 hours later. “For about 24 hours, I was in bliss,” recalls Royce Crown. Then came the backlash. In a spirit of generosity he came to regret, Crown had told passengers that if the planes were filled to capacity and all costs were covered, Monarc might pay partial refunds. By the time the second Lion Air flight left Delhi on April 16, he realised his fuel and airport costs were far higher than expected and hastily put an end to that offer. But some people began demanding refunds within hours of arriving at their quarantine hotels, then grumbled on Facebook when the money was not immediately sent. Others seemed to assume Monarc had put on the flights as a money-making exercise and griped that Lion Air did not provide children’s meals, that the entertainment system on the plane hadn’t functioned or that the view from the hotel room in Melbourne was terrible. “We got a few compliments, which was really nice, but they were few and far between,” Crown recalls. “Anything that went wrong – any delays, complaints about luggage – we got hit with it. One of our girls was in tears twice a day because of being yelled at. We were told what a horrible company we were, how could we do this? It took a toll.” “We were all in different time zones,” says Hempel, “so I’d catch a few hours’ sleep and wake up to a mountain of WhatsApp messages, thinking: ‘What’s happened – have we lost a plane?’ No, it’s just a cold cheese sandwich in Row 32.” Quinn and his team, frantically trying to organise flights out of Chennai and Mumbai in India’s south, were deeply aggrieved by the social media speculation that they were profiteering. The rumours probably weren’t helped by an SBS report that falsely claimed the rescue operation was being “spearheaded” by Jagvinder Singh Virk, a Sydney property developer and businessman. Virk, whose strong Liberal Party connections make him a contentious figure in Australia’s Sikh community, had popped up on the Facebook page early on, offering video explainers in Hindi and help via his Liberal Party and Indian government contacts. By mid-April he was granting interviews and being hailed as a hero in Indian media. “He kind of just appeared one day,” laughs Quinn, who appreciated Virk’s help in contacting Indian authorities but found himself caught in the crossfire of Liberal/Labor Sikh politics for a while. The whingeing on Facebook eventually became too much even for Quinn, who abandoned his imperturbable patience to deliver a few memorable rebukes. “I’m sorry to hear about your hellish experience,” he told one unhappy customer. “Unfortunately, I believe your ordeal might continue in your taxpayer-funded five-star hotel room, as I am hearing awful incidents of people being delivered undercooked peas and there being excessive dust behind lamps.” On April 19 and 20, three more Lion Air jets left India bearing Australian passengers, the final flights from Mumbai and Chennai being redirected to Adelaide at the last minute in one final moment of chaos. Five planes had brought 2013 people home and Quinn’s team was ready to arrange more, but the Australian government was now determined to organise its own flights, if only to save face. On April 23, it announced it had put on Qatar Airways and Qantas flights out of India, and Quinn’s team decided its work was done. In the wash-up, Royce Crown estimates his firm Monarc Global lost about $50,000 on the enterprise after paying a $51 refund to everyone on the first flight; Brendon Hempel’s Stratos Aviation made a small profit after paying a $200 rebate to seniors and children under 10. Simon Quinn received absolutely no material reward, although one female passenger did suggest they get married and scores of people took to Facebook to shower him with praise and adulation. As late as a few weeks ago, he was still extricating himself from his role as saviour and shining light, as Australians still stuck in India bombarded him with questions about government repatriation flights in the mistaken belief he was organising them. “I had to give up my own life and routine for about six weeks but, all in all, I made some lifelong friends and met some fascinating characters,” he says. “I guess it was a privilege, really, to help that many people.”
fatbhoytim Posted June 20, 2020 Share Posted June 20, 2020 1 hour ago, forcebwithu said: Not quite as sinister as this would make it seem, at least on Android phones. Had a look on my phone and see under Services "COVID-19 Exposure Notifications". Clicking on that you can see two things have to happen for the service to work. One, you need to turn bluetooth on, and the second, most important one is this, "To turn on COVID-19 Exposure Notifications, install or finish setting up a participating app". So no tracking apps were automatically installed, just the framework for one offered by Google. Aye, totally understand that, but the point I was trying to make was they have installed this app without any fanfare or notification. Surely the government should be more transparent especially on matters such as these ? At least they have given people a choice to complete install, but if they were more forthcoming then more people would be aware of this app. I for one did not know this app was on my phone until I got that post through facebook. Why the secrecy? 2 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
forcebwithu Posted June 20, 2020 Share Posted June 20, 2020 Just now, fatbhoytim said: Aye, totally understand that, but the point I was trying to make was they have installed this app without any fanfare or notification. Surely the government should be more transparent especially on matters such as these ? At least they have given people a choice to complete install, but if they were more forthcoming then more people would be aware of this app. I for one did not know this app was on my phone until I got that post through facebook. Why the secrecy? It is a concern they can install this stuff without our permission. Correction, we probably did grant permission when we checked the box to agree to the terms of use that nobody ever reads when we first bought the phone. Did a quick search and there was a public announcement from both Apple and Google when they rolled this out (link). I also found the following with more detail on the app.Exposure Notifications: Using technology to help public health authorities fight COVID‑19 On a positive note, you do have to opt in rather than Google turning it on without our explicit authorization. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
fforest Posted June 20, 2020 Share Posted June 20, 2020 (edited) 2 hours ago, forcebwithu said: Not quite as sinister as this would make it seem, at least on Android phones. Had a look on my phone and see under Services "COVID-19 Exposure Notifications". Clicking on that you can see two things have to happen for the service to work. One, you need to turn bluetooth on, and the second, most important one is this, "To turn on COVID-19 Exposure Notifications, install or finish setting up a participating app". So no tracking apps were automatically installed, just the framework for one offered by Google. Turning off google play services I have heard disables the Covid 19 thing that was downloaded on many people phone without their consent...I turned mine off.....If I ever need any thing from google play I will turn it back on..... Edited June 20, 2020 by fforest 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
fforest Posted June 20, 2020 Share Posted June 20, 2020 35 minutes ago, fatbhoytim said: Aye, totally understand that, but the point I was trying to make was they have installed this app without any fanfare or notification. Surely the government should be more transparent especially on matters such as these ? At least they have given people a choice to complete install, but if they were more forthcoming then more people would be aware of this app. I for one did not know this app was on my phone until I got that post through facebook. Why the secrecy? Because everyone will get onboard with the NWO-New Normal whether they want to or not.....Masked people have no voice... 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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