Australia has a new four-phase plan for a return to normality. Here’s what we know so far

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Adrian Esterman, University of South AustraliaPrime Minister Scott Morrison has received criticism from the general public for not having a concrete plan to take us out of the COVID-19 pandemic.

However, he went some way to addressing this on Friday, announcing national cabinet had agreed to a four-phase plan to get us back to something resembling our pre-COVID way of life.

It’s not yet very detailed, and no dates have been set out for the various phases. But we do have some idea of what’s being proposed, and Morrison said moving through each phase will depend on reaching vaccination targets determined from modelling, currently being undertaken by Melbourne’s Peter Doherty Institute.

The idea is to transition from our current priority of suppressing transmission of the virus, to a focus on the prevention of serious illness, hospitalisation and deaths.

Let me take you through each phase and what we know so far.

Phase 1: vaccinate, prepare and pilot

We are in Phase 1 now, and the aim is to continue to minimise community transmission.

Lockdowns may continue to be used in this phase, although only as a last resort.

The international arrivals cap will now be reduced by 50% to take pressure off our hotel quarantine system due to the increased infectiousness of the Delta variant.

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Morrison has indicated he expects the cap to stay in place until at least the beginning of 2022.

However, the federal government will facilitate increased repatriation flights to Darwin for quarantine at Howard Springs.

Also, as part of this current phase, there will be a trial of home quarantine for fully vaccinated returnees. This will be for seven days rather than 14.

South Australia has already indicated it would be willing to take part in this trial.

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Phase 2: post-vaccination

In this phase, the international arrival cap will be restored to current levels for unvaccinated passengers, and a larger cap applied to fully vaccinated passengers.

Lockdowns would rarely be needed, and fully vaccinated people would have eased restrictions in any outbreak with respect to lockdowns or border closures. More students and economic visitors will also be allowed in.

Although no dates or vaccine rollout targets have been set, for us to reach Phase 2, we would clearly need a high percentage of our population to be fully vaccinated.

As it will take at least until the end of year for the whole adult population to have received their first dose, Phase 2 is likely to kick in some time in the first half of 2022.

Phase 3: consolidation

In Phase 3, COVID would be treated more like the flu, presumably with annual booster shots to account for new variants. Fully vaccinated Australians would be able to travel abroad.

There would be no lockdowns, no cap on returning vaccinated travellers, and no domestic restrictions for vaccinated residents. We would be able to have travel bubbles with countries in a similar situation.

There would also be increased, albeit still capped, entries for international students.

Realistically, we are probably talking about the second half of 2022 before we can enter Phase 3.

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Phase 4: final

Here life returns to relative normality, very similar to the way it was before the pandemic began. However, there would still be pre- and post-flight testing for unvaccinated arrivals, and a vaccine passport system will likely be in place. I imagine there will still be a focus on hand hygiene and coughing etiquette.

The plan depends to a large extent on vaccine availability, any new and more transmissible variants arising, and persuading enough Australians to get vaccinated.

It will create a two-class system of those who are fully vaccinated and who will have lots of freedoms, and those not. Although there are some people who, for medical or even religious reasons, might not be able to be vaccinated, for the vast majority, it is a choice.

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Morrison’s statement says the plan will depend very much on the percentage of Australians 16 years and older who are fully vaccinated.

However, the Delta variant may be spreading more easily in children, although it’s not yet clear whether this is simply a function of the variant being more transmissible in general. It’s also unclear whether this leads to increased serious illness in those children infected.

Overall, I think the plan is sensible, if somewhat vague. Phase 1 calls for lockdowns to be a last resort, although I think this a big ask given the low percentage of the population currently fully vaccinated. Singapore has proposed a similar plan, but is way ahead of us in its vaccine rollout, with more than 60% of its population likely to be fully vaccinated by August.

So, for those desperate for international holidays, there is light at the end of the tunnel. You can potentially start packing in the second half of next year.

Adrian Esterman, Professor of Biostatistics and Epidemiology, University of South Australia

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Plot Targeting Turkey’s Religious Minorities Allegedly Discovered

CD indicates naval officers planned violence against non-Muslim communities.

ISTANBUL, December 16 (CDN) — ISTANBUL, December 16 (Compass Direct News) – Chilling allegations emerged last month of a detailed plot by Turkish naval officers to perpetrate threats and violence against the nation’s non-Muslims in an effort to implicate and unseat Turkey’s pro-Islamic government.

Evidence put forth for the plot appeared on an encrypted compact disc discovered last April but was only recently deciphered; the daily Taraf newspaper first leaked details of the CD’s contents on Nov. 19.

Entitled the “Operation Cage Action Plan,” the plot outlines a plethora of planned threat campaigns, bomb attacks, kidnappings and assassinations targeting the nation’s tiny religious minority communities – an apparent effort by military brass to discredit the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP). The scheme ultimately called for bombings of homes and buildings owned by non-Muslims, setting fire to homes, vehicles and businesses of Christian and Jewish citizens, and murdering prominent leaders among the religious minorities.

Dated March 2009, the CD containing details of the plot was discovered in a raid on the office of a retired major implicated in a large illegal cache of military arms uncovered near Istanbul last April. Once deciphered, it revealed the full names of 41 naval officials assigned to carry out a four-phase campaign exploiting the vulnerability of Turkey’s non-Muslim religious minorities, who constitute less than 1 percent of the population.

A map that Taraf published on its front page – headlined “The Targeted Missionaries” – was based on the controversial CD documents. Color-coded to show all the Turkish provinces where non-Muslims lived or had meetings for worship, the map showed only 13 of Turkey’s 81 provinces had no known non-Muslim residents or religious meetings.

The plan identified 939 non-Muslim representatives in Turkey as possible targets.

“If even half of what is written in Taraf is accurate, everybody with a conscience in this country has to go mad,” Eyup Can wrote in his Hurriyet column two days after the news broke.

The day after the first Taraf report, the headquarters of the Turkish General Staff filed a criminal complaint against the daily with the Justice Ministry, declaring its coverage a “clear violation” of the laws protecting ongoing prosecution investigations from public release.

Although the prime minister’s office the next day confirmed that the newly revealed “Cage” plot was indeed under official investigation, Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan criticized Taraf’s public disclosure of the plan as “interfering” and “damaging” to the judicial process and important sectors of the government.

But when the judiciary began interrogating a number of the named naval suspects and sent some of them to jail, most Turkish media – which had downplayed the claims – began to accept the plot’s possible authenticity.

To date, at least 11 of the naval officials identified in the Cage documents are under arrest, accused of membership in an illegal organization. They include a retired major, a lieutenant colonel, three lieutenant commanders, two colonels and three first sergeants.

The latest plot allegations are linked to criminal investigations launched in June 2007 into Ergenekon, an alleged “deep state” conspiracy by a group of military officials, state security personnel, lawyers and journalists now behind bars on charges of planning a coup against the elected AKP government.

Christian Murders Termed ‘Operations’

The plot document began with specific mention of the three most recent deadly attacks perpetrated against Christians in Turkey, cryptically labeling them “operations.”

Initial Turkish public opinion had blamed Islamist groups for the savage murders of Italian Catholic priest Andrea Santoro (February 2006), Turkish Armenian Agos newspaper editor Hrant Dink (January 2007) and two Turkish Christians and a German Christian in Malatya (April 2007). But authors of the Cage plan complained that AKP’s “intensive propaganda” after these incidents had instead fingered the Ergenekon cabal as the perpetrators.

“The Cage plan demanded that these ‘operations’ be conducted in a more systematic and planned manner,” attorney Orhan Kemal Cengiz wrote in Today’s Zaman on Nov. 27. “They want to re-market the ‘black propaganda’ that Muslims kill Christians,” concluded Cengiz, a joint-plaintiff lawyer in the Malatya murder trial and legal adviser to Turkey’s Association of Protestant Churches.

In the first phase of the Cage plot, officers were ordered to compile information identifying the non-Muslim communities’ leaders, schools, associations, cemeteries, places of worship and media outlets, including all subscribers to the Armenian Agos weekly. With this data, the second stage called for creating an atmosphere of fear by openly targeting these religious minorities, using intimidating letters and telephone calls, warnings posted on websites linked to the government and graffiti in neighborhoods where non-Muslims lived.

To channel public opinion, the third phase centered on priming TV and print media to criticize and debate the AKP government’s handling of security for religious minorities, to raise the specter of the party ultimately replacing Turkey’s secular laws and institutions with Islamic provisions.

The final phase called for planting bombs and suspicious packages near homes and buildings owned by non-Muslims, desecrating their cemeteries, setting fire to homes, vehicles and businesses of Christian and Jewish citizens, and even kidnapping and assassinating prominent leaders among the religious minorities.

Lawyer Fethiye Cetin, representing the Dink family in the Agos editor’s murder trial, admitted she was having difficulty even accepting the details of the Cage plot.

“I am engulfed in horror,” Cetin told Bianet, the online Independent Communications Network. “Some forces of this country sit down and make a plan to identify their fellow citizens, of their own country, as enemies! They will kill Armenians and non-Muslims in the psychological war they are conducting against the ones identified as their enemies.”

No Surprise to Christians

“We were not very shocked,” Protestant Pastor Ihsan Ozbek of the Kurtulus Churches in Ankara admitted to Taraf the day after the news broke.

After the Malatya murders, he stated, Christians had no official means to investigate their suspicions about the instigators, “and we could not be very brave . . . Once again the evidence is being seen, that it is the juntas who are against democracy who [have been] behind the propaganda in the past 10 years against Christianity and missionary activity.”

Patriarch Bartholomew of the Greek Orthodox Church also openly addressed the Cage plot, referring to recent incidents of intimidation against Christian and Jewish citizens in Istanbul’s Kurtulus and Adalar districts, as well as a previous raid conducted against the alumni of a Greek high school.

“At the time, we thought that they were just trying to scare us,” he told Today’s Zaman. Several of the jailed Ergenekon suspects now on trial were closely involved for years in protesting and slandering the Istanbul Patriarchate, considered the heart of Eastern Orthodoxy’s 300 million adherents. As ultranationalists, they claimed the Orthodox wanted to set up a Vatican-style entity within Turkey.

Last summer 90 graves were desecrated in the Greek Orthodox community’s Balikli cemetery in the Zeytinburnu district of Istanbul. The city’s 65 non-Muslim cemeteries are not guarded by the municipality, with their maintenance and protection left to Greek, Armenian and Jewish minorities.

As details continued to emerge and national debates raged for more than a week over the Cage plan in the Turkish media, calls came from a broad spectrum of society to merge the files of the ongoing Dink and Malatya murder trials with the Ergenekon file. The Turkish General Staff has consistently labeled much of the media coverage of the Ergenekon investigations as part of smear campaign against the fiercely secular military, which until the past two years enjoyed virtual impunity from civilian court investigations.

According to Ria Oomen-Ruijten, the European Parliament’s rapporteur on Turkey, the long-entrenched role of the military in the Turkish government is an “obstacle” for further democratization and integration into the EU.

Report from Compass Direct News