Shuttering society not the solution

I wonder if Daniel Andrews has any idea what it’s like for a retired 70-year-old living alone in outer Melbourne during the COVID-19 lockdowns? I doubt it. In the early stages of the pandemic I started to realise my plans to visit family and friends interstate and take an organised overseas trip were going to be put on hold for a while (now perhaps indefinitely). I reluctantly accepted that I could not hold a 70th birthday party and the restrictions on seeing family and friends.

I rarely go to the local shopping centre, where there’s more paranoia than goods for sale, and I’ve scrubbed my hands both before and after these trips so many times I’m lucky I still have fingerprints.

However, all this was minor compared to being turned back at the South Australian border — a 931km drive — on the way to a family funeral following a tragedy, despite presenting a COVID-19 clearance and all the associated paperwork.

Every day I think about the lucky ones living in other states who have some freedom of movement, but then again they don’t have our Premier; and they are not the recipients of the disastrous hotel lockdown fiasco. I can only dream of going back into the polling both; 2022 cannot come quickly enough for me.

David N. Rayner, Plenty, Vic

Adam Creighton has belled the cat (“We’re pretty safe, let’s not kill our economy”, 21/7). Late December, Taiwan warned COVID-19 was contagious and deadly but the World Health Organisation said “no, it’s not”. No one could trust Beijing (hence the China travel boycott) and because viruses always mutate, the, magnitude of the disaster was unknown. “Flattening the curve” from April to June was demanded to eradicate the virus, but nobody predicted a resilience that would necessitate repeated, pointless, puritanical lockdowns. To date, 600,00 job losses and a looming $1 trillion in federal government debt have failed to suppress a disease without a vaccine or cure.

Continuing to hide indoors is a fool’s errand. Had schools remained open most families would have contracted immunity; and in Sweden — the only nation balancing limited restrictions, social distancing and community immunity — the population’s survival rate of 99.9 per cent is statistically inseparable from those of Britain and France, whose economies and communities have been devastated.

The incidence of chronic/acute infections preceding death is the only salient number: and more than 90 per cent of deaths, being the very elderly, were people who were sadly dying anyway. Further isolation to protect these people may be desirable but shuttering society indefinitely is not. Most job losses for people in their 50s and 60s will never be recovered.

Greg Jones, Kogarah, NSW

Many in small business are struggling with the possibility of bankruptcy through the inability of the Andrews government to curtail the spread of coronavirus. Its failure in hotel quarantining and lack of action to prevent the Black Lives Matter protesters flagged to others that it is acceptable for them to forgo social distancing.

Those now unemployed and financially struggling individuals in the private sector are scratching their heads wondering how “we are all in this together” as the Andrews government awards public servants a two per cent pay increase.

Ian Kent, Renmark, SA

In a NSW south coast queue on Tuesday about 100 people waited in line for COVID-19 testing. About 90 per cent were wearing masks. It was glaringly obvious those without masks were practising social distancing. The great bulk of those wearing masks were not.

This one sample, of course, proves nothing. But it does add weight to concerns expressed by some doctors that over-emphasis on the role of masks can cause people to believe the mask is their primary defence against the virus at the expense of other, more important, aspects such as distancing and hand hygiene.

Phil Teece, Sunshine Bay, NSW

Your editorial “Course correction for Andrews” (22/7) raises a number of significant issues. Among them, it mentions the Melbourne Black Lives Matter rally as a possible cause of the “second spike” in coronavirus cases in Victoria. Apologists will offer the “fact” that only six cases of coronavirus infection are proven to have emanated from that rally. Among a densely packed crowd of about 10,000, how many undetected cases could there have been?

Bill Pannell, Dalkeith, WA