CV and mad panic behaviour

[Thryleon]

You’re a footy fan who is outraged that the AFL takes the necessary steps to ensure games can be played. Interesting. Maybe your outrage is as sincere as Captain Renault’s in Casablanca when he closed down Rick’s Café upon being shocked to discover gambling was taking place.

AFL players may be celebs but they’re also workers. The AFL mandates testing and adherence to protocols worked out with the various governments. Remember a few players have been 86’d for breaching them. The players don’t wake up in the morning and decide they’d like their brains massaged through their nostrils just for fun.

Does the AFL have privileged access to testing? I don’t know. I remember seeing film of them attending a drive-through testing station. Maybe that was one open to the public, maybe not. Until this latest outbreak, authorities were begging Victorians to get tested and there really weren’t any queues. But access to tests has hardly been restricted. If the AFL has, like other employers such as hospitals, organised its own testing of its workers, that’s hardly a basis for crying privilege. Are players’ samples processed more quickly? Unknown. But if there are private firms that process tests more quickly at the employers expense and the government requires the AFL to pay for that service, is that celeb-style privilege?

As with the comment about MRIs, I’d be more than happy to kill off the private option in healthcare and education. Get rid of private hospitals and private schools. But until that occurs, it’s a bit rich to slam people who pay privately for those services.

Professional athletes should be high priority to get the appropriate tests done.  In this case its not just a threat to the player and players.  Its competition threatening as well as them not being able to continue without these tests and procedures.  Imagine lock down with no footy to watch....

Before anyone is outraged, hear me out regarding ordinary testing too.

These tests and procedures are all categorised into priority and they bump people up and down based on threat to life and ability to function as a human being.

The majority of people waiting on lists for procedures and waiting to see specialists have generally been assessed as non life threatening and relative to others on list, non debilitating.  Capacity and luck drives this as much as anything else.

Non debilitating might mean a lot of things but this isn't utopia and they must take a pragmatic and repeatable approach to these matters. 

If you're lucky, and not many are waiting for the same procedure for that clinic, you'll get in fast.  If there's lots waiting and its both non life threatening and non debilitating which usually is interpreted as not requiring constant care giving, or constantly in pain you'll get in.

The more time wasters I.e. people who are impacted but impatient rather than actually requiring hugh categorised reaction, the harder it is for the system to prioritize essential first.

In the case of footballers, physical tests go to professional risk and the majority of their procedures and tests will be acute which brings them to the top of the list just like any emergency emergency patient.

This is where it gets tricky. 

Conditions can become life threatening of not treated timely.  They can become debilitating if not treated quickly.

Capacity is Capacity though and footballers don't get preferential treatment just because they're footballers.  They get that treatment because the system has built in mechanisms for accommodating emergency cases requiring quick transition through the system and that capacity can be stretched when emergencies are required.

This is true for anyone.  Heart attack, diagnosis of cancer, other injuries requiring fast diagnosis of surgery.  This is not third world society or communist nations where you only get in by paying or knowing people.  This is the system.  Its imperfect but it does its best.  The majority of athletes are treated privately and pay to get the quick turnaround that Joe average could too.  Thats the difference here.