Welcome to what is hopefully the last edition of Project COVID Skies. Ok, maybe not last as in, I will probably do some future editions with a best of and also document anything of note, but hopefully the last in terms of the original project premise of continuing this project whilst in stage 3 restrictions or higher.

As this project started 2 weeks after our initial lockdown started it also signifies a total of 6 months that Melbourne has been under stage 3 or higher restrictions.

Today 18th October 2020, the Victorian government has announced the easing of a number of restrictions effective from midnight tonight. Our 5km travel restriction will be increased to 25km and the restriction of being allowed out for just 2 hours has also been removed. Thus, the criteria for my project will be no longer in place and I can get out and take photographs of something else.

These announcements have come just as the last few days have seen very low new case numbers across Victoria. The new case numbers from Monday 12th October 2020 - Sunday 18th October 2020 are; 14, 10, 6, 4, 2, 0 and 2. The total for the week was just 38 and there is a total of 137 active cases currently in Victoria. 12 people remain in hospital, the are 0 in ICU and in the last week just 6 people have sadly passed away.

In other news the New Zealand bubble has commenced with NSW and the NT. This is a one way bubble with no need to quarantine on arrival into Australia, however quarantine will be required on entry to back to NZ. This bubble has created a few feathers to be ruffled as a number of people who came in from NZ have made their way to Melbourne. The Victorian government is a bit upset by that, however the Victorian border is open to anyone within Australia who wants to enter it. Any people coming to Victoria will need to follow any restrictions that are in place. This also means leaving Victoria will be difficult and presently would mean quarantine in NSW before being allowed to fly to NZ to quarantine again. My suspicions are that these people probably live here and won’t be in a hurry to leave. The certainly won’t be tourists looking for site seeing in a largely deserted city.

THANK YOU to everyone who has been following along with my weekly blog and keep an eye out for future random editions of Project COVID Skies. Hopefully I will be blogging about something else soon but in the meantime I might enjoy a few weekends off and hope that there will be no need to return to Project COVID skies under the lockdown premise. Time will tell……

In Melbourne we are getting closer to freedom. The numbers are coming down nicely and diving in further to the numbers there is very little new cases in the community, in fact there was no cases of community transmission in the last week. We are now at a point where contact tracers are able to act quickly and get hopefully get us on top of managing the virus inline with the other states.

The numbers of new cases for the week Monday 28th September to Sunday 4th October in Victoria were; 4, 9, 11, 14, 8, 6 and 12 for a total of 64 new cases. Total deaths for the week was 12. There was an outbreak at Chadstone shopping centre related to a family outbreak in Frankston, which has attributed to many of those new cases.

As the weather really warmed up at the end of the week many people went out to St Kilda beach and were not following social distancing and many did not have masks. It is really frustrating and disappointing to be so close to officially having restrictions eased that a number of selfish people would put that at risk. Is the idea of a relatively free summer worth a few nights of stupidity?

The biggest COVID related news of the week by far was the president of the Unites States of America, Donald Trump testing positive. With a month to go before the election it is crazy news. The implications of what could happen are mind boggling and who knows what effect it might have on the results. If Trump does recover well from the virus he will be able to use it to his advantage inline with his rhetoric on the virus just being the flu and the USA should re-open and just get on with it.

Not many great photos this week, the skies were either mostly grey or clear with not many clouds of good definition. One interesting capture was a helicopter which just looked like a black helicopter when I took the photo with closer inspection revealing it was a police helicopter.