Perth man jailed for 7 months after breaching self-quarantine instructions | Hacker News Reader

Perth man jailed for 7 months after breaching self-quarantine instructions

skynews.com.au

32 pointsmrfusion52 comments

I clicked the article expecting some floridaman type story full of shenanigans and aggravating circumstances but nope, he just had some contractors over to do work and had some people over to buy stuff via classifieds. The latter doesn't even require them to come into your house or get within any appreciable distance of you. I get that a former penal colony probably has inherited expansive judicial discretion enabling the judge to dish out this kind of sentence (and judges tend not to take thumbing one's nose at state authority very well) but it's not like he threw a party or invited his buddies over for dinner or something, heck, there's not even a mention of this guy having a prior record. Any aggravating factor I could see leading to this kind of sentence (like getting in a fight with the arresting officers and the majority of the time being for that violation) is simply absent.

Imagine you are a tradesperson and get hired for some job. You go to the house, complete the work, only to later find out the owner of the house (who was there the whole time) was legally required to self-isolate due to risk of having COVID. How would you feel? What if the tradesperson lived with elderly parents or had kids or someone they were in touch with that was high risk?

7 months in prison is an insane punishment for "you could possibly have COVID and your contractor could possibly not be able to get a vaccine or wear a mask or etc and he could also have immunocompromised family members". Note that Western Australia has a 7 day average of 1 covid case and not a single death since May 2020 (9 total COVID deaths) [0].

The maximum term for drunk driving in Perth is 18 months[1] and that's for a repeat offense with a BAC in excess of 0.15. Is our contractor scenario really ~5 times more dangerous than multiple driving-while-absolutely-hammered offenses?

[0]: https://www.google.com/search?client=safari&rls=en&q=covid+c...

[1]: https://www.gotocourt.com.au/drink-driving/wa/dui-penalties/

The number of possible deaths is _far_ higher. The chance is almost certainly lower. I would not be at all surprised if on the balance it's way worse than 5 times more dangerous, in terms of expected lives lost (in statistical terms).

The point is we're now at the point of jailing people based on conjecture and projection and statistics instead of them committing an actual crime.

What is the statistical likelihood that any person of a specific religious group will commit an act of terrorism? Should we find that number and then jail a random swath of their population?

It is an actual crime. This person risked many people's lives for their own convenience. He did actual actions, not possible future activity.

If I fire a gun into a building blindly, the chance I kill anyone is low. Should that be legal?

I think we're all arguing for sentencing in proportion to risk; we differ in our relative risk assessments. You mention that you think being near someone (presumably while masked?) is at least 5x more dangerous than drunk driving (per your comment upthread) while I (and presumably the parent) disagree.

I don't know about that. Ggp seems to be arguing that any crime based on risk (and not outcome) should not be a crime, though their possibly forthcoming reply may clarify.

If we agree it should be a crime and just disagree on severity, that seems fair enough and (at least to me) not worth any further discussion than I already engaged in on it.

Yeah, I can't speak for him. We definitely outlaw things that are simply very risky (e.g., drunk driving) whether or not anyone is actually injured. I don't have a problem with prohibiting unnecessary social gatherings, but this feels like it should be a $200 USD fine--certainly not 5 times the max drunk driving sentence.

7 months is not five times 18 months, did you misread this as 7 years?

What if they found out before, not later? The story doesn't say he failed to inform. In fact, it was someone whom he informed who informed on him.

People don't get to make the rules.

He's being accused of endangerment by the GP comment, which assumes he lied and omitted his status. That's speculation and has nothing to do with the law he supposedly broke.

I said people don't get to make the rules referring to your comment about what if the homeowner informed the tradesperson first. Well that's the thing, you can't break the rules just because everyone is in agreement that it's ok. There were many documented parties that occurred during the pandemic and just because everyone was aware they were breaking rules, doesn't make it legal.

By the story, we don't have enough information to determine that, and it wouldn't make it moral if so, but even questioning this is taboo.

I guess stating facts is beyond the pale.

Australia took quarantine really seriously. The plus side: less than a thousand deaths, hospitality mostly open, very few short lockdowns.

The downside is that the lockdowns that do happen are very heavy, and anyone breaching them is treated like a smoker in a fireworks factory.

The deaths and despair from lockdowns far surpass those created from COVID alone.

I bet missed cancer screenings alone have caused more than a thousand deaths in Australia.

You’re comparing mismatched quantities. You should be comparing how many would have died and how much despair would be caused in the absence of the lockdown.

Consider this hypothetical: a pandemic solution which completely eliminates the disease while causing exactly 1 premature death. The death and despair from the solution far surpasses that of the disease itself, with infinity percent more death! This is clearly not a useful metric.

In the case of COVID, everywhere had some kind of pandemic response, but the least effective so far is Peru with 5982.3 deaths per million population, vs Australia’s 36 per million. Multiply by population, and the difference between the Peruvian and Australian fatality rate indicates Australia saved 152 thousand people. That’s the number of Australian residents you need to suspect have fatally missed a cancer screening.

Caveat: it ain’t over ‘till it’s over, and the Iron Pyrite medal for highest death toll can always change hands.

Edit: decimal point off by one

This is such an unfounded skynews hyperbolic sort of comment.

In no way could you provide any sort of facts for this statement.

I was wondering around a Sydney suburb (somewhere across the bay from city center) and came across a dresser somebody had dumped on the sidewalk—something you’d see a dozen times a day in any American city, rich or poor neighborhood. An enforcement agency had slapped a sticker on it warning about jail time if the perpetrator was caught. Harsh, perhaps, but it was the only junk furniture I saw in two weeks.

There are periodic bulk waste collection times where you can put out large furniture like that. People (both individuals and junk dealers) will go around collecting anything good. At the end of the week, the council collects what is left free of charge. Outside of those times, it is illegal dumping. You don't see much of it because there is legal and free pick up available.

Well sure, that’s how it works in most Western cities—the cost and service vary, of course. Never seen the jail time threat though.

Sydney is the only place I have seen where it was a free, regularly scheduled, community event where everyone's stuff (in a particular area) went out at the same time and could be freely picked up thus diverting it from the landfill. The leftovers were then picked up by the council free of charge.

A lot of American cities have a “bulk waste amnesty day” which is similar.

Having contractors over to do work is a great way to spread a disease. The classifieds buyers are less of a big deal, but having shades of gray is probably unenforceable for any law like this.

Like how do you decide what is an acceptable violation of quarantine? Who decides? Who pays them to spend a lot of time deciding?

A country that has single-digit cases and is desperately trying to get it back to zero will necessarily and justifiedly have much stricter quarantine rules.

Safety wise, this is comparable to randomly firing a bullet at an occupied building. Most likely the bullet will miss (the guy won't be infected/won't infect), but if you get really unlucky (someone gets infected and spreads it before that connection can be discovered), the results are disastrous (and deadly - COVID still has a 1% IFR as far as I know).

The case numbers were 99 yesterday, so yes, double digit, but it’s not good.

Australia locked down, but from a New Zealand perspective their lockdowns have been rather less harsh than ours. Supermarkets and medical practices (for humans and animals) were all we had open.

It has seemed that their way got the results while having more shops open, though they are in a tight spot right now.

The IFR, depending on whom you believe, was always in the 0.23-0.7% range. The CFR is a worthless junk statistic for estimating risk to the individual and is only of use for managing services.

Whether it is lower now or not is more a philosophical question as empirical, the IFR has been demolished by vaccinating the elderly.

This can be taken two ways.... Either that Covid was never a risk to most people to begin with and only appeared deadly because of those close to death, OR Vaccines have saved us.

Either way, the CFR in Briton of the Delta Variant is 0.13%, for the unvaccinated that number is 0.08%

A reasonable IFR rate would be close to half those rates (in my opinion, as that is unknowable)

https://archive.is/Um0V9

This story isn't enough to gauge safety. We don't know who wasn't vaccinated or when he informed visitors of his quarantine status.

I never found Australia to have particularly strict law enforcement in general. However, they have been taking covid very seriously and have had correspondingly low infection rates.

> However, they have been taking covid very seriously and have had correspondingly low infection rates.

I think geography is doing the bulk of the lifting. Being on a sparsely populated island helps a whole lot.

86% of the population is urban, so it is only sparsely populated on average; there are plenty of opportunities for a disease to spread. Their relative isolation and the fact that they effectively closed their borders (so hard that even Australian citizens had a hard time getting in) before covid made it in has indeed helped with their "success." They have also had very hard (but short) lock downs whenever a case was detected in order to trace contacts.

Right, but "closing borders" is dramatically easier when you're an island. You have formal ports of entry, your infrastructure is set up such that you have a cargo ship unloading at a port and then someone else drives the cargo to its destination. Consider, for example, goods produced in Poland and delivered to central Germany--there's no neat handoff between different delivery personnel at the border, unlike at a shipping port. Further, consider how many millions of people live on one side of a European, Asian, or American border and work on another side--how many Australians commute outside of Australia in their daily commutes or vice versa?

oh Australians really like rules.

so when lockdowns come out we (especially in the west) just loved going into lockdown and dishing shit on those that flouted the rules. its a weird dichotomy that we're very easy going and freedom loving yet also love rules and enforcing them.

Yeah nah.

I will criticise the government and their laws, be skeptical, be very vocal about my privacy rights etc.

But when it comes to covid, the restrictions make sense, and I agree with the goal for which they are deployed to meet, which is reduce spread, hospitalisation, and death.

So do I like rules? No. Do I want to stop the spread? Yes. It's that simple.

>I get that a former penal colony probably has inherited expansive judicial discretion

This made me double take. The Thirteen colonies was used as a penal colony too, so maybe the USA has expansive judicial discretion too, or maybe it's not really relevant.

Well it does have both the highest incarceration rate and highest absolute number of people incarcerated in the world.

Just carrying on the tradition then I suppose.

If I invited a contractor into my home and I knew there was say exposed live electricity wires. Even if the contractors was not damaged - I should be prosecuted.

So he exposed someone to a risk that was avoidable. Any other Health and Safety risk, would have been prosecuted in the same way (in the UK not Australia). [CDM regulations]

Or he informed them ahead of time and they took the risk on their own.

> He was sentenced to seven months in prison, but can walk free after serving just two months behind bars.

I don't know if you read the part where it says that he actually needs to spend only 2 months behind bars, but if you didn't, does that change your opinion?

You seem to think that not following a quarantine order isn't a big deal. Others think otherwise.

On the other hand Aus is basically covid free and has been for nearly a year.

Meanwhile us Liberal brits let everyone flout the rules and we're headed into a third wave despite being over 60% vaccinated. Oh and we created at least 1 new variant. Oh and we've had a lot more disruption, lockdowns, curfews etc.

Sometimes giving up some freedom now gets you a lot more freedom (and fewer dead people) in the very near future.

I couldn’t agree more, this is some serious judicial overreach bordering bordering on cruelty. Based on the recent discussion here about vaccination discrimination, I worry we are headed in a direction for much of the rest where you will be arrested if you leave the house unvaccinated.

These are emergency powers assumed under a pandemic, settle down now.

This article[1] has a little more detail.

[1] https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9783343/WA-man-sent...

Some things to note:

* There were fifteen separate incidents of quarantine breach. He also, "regularly left his house for hours at a time" during that period.

* The magistrate as much as said the harshness was in-part a warning to other would-be offenders (sending a "powerful message").

Yeah, we do take quarantine pretty seriously here. Having gone through the extended lockdowns in Victoria, while our geography was advantageous, it also required a huge effort of societal and political will and cooperation to get back to zero community transmission. It relied on following the advice of our health experts and scientists in the face of large economic and political pressures.

In Melbourne now we are enjoying reasonably normal conditions compared to B.C. (Before COVID) times. So we have a pretty low tolerance for any "dick-head" that may put that at risk. That said, I'm surprised at jail time instead of a steep monetary fine.

It is a shame we pretty much squandered our gains with a very poorly handled vaccination roll-out (but that's a discussion for another time).

Well, now he will get a government provided "quarantine".

I'm looking forward to Australia relaxing entry requirements on vaccinated international travelers.

In North Korea, they just shoot them.

Buddy they do that in America too

Australians, please, vote out your leadership. The Morrison administration is the worst thing to happen to Australia in years. Absolutely incompetence, misinformation, pandering to fossil fuel industry, environmental destruction and lies.

Media Watch, the ABC news program captures some of the absolute stupidity occurring down under: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLDTPrMoGHssBtV3J7BBLZ...

This all could have been resolved by now if Australia had decent leadership. They were offered the solution, but were so pig headed they refused it. Now they are in an even worse situation.

"Australia is a lucky country run mainly by second rate people who share its luck. It lives on other people's ideas, and, although its ordinary people are adaptable, most of its leaders (in all fields) so lack curiosity about the events that surround them that they are often taken by surprise." Donald Horne, 1964

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