Time to build proper quarantine facilities before more mutant strains arrive

Greg Sheridan’s excellent article “India’s lesson is this virus is just getting started” (1-2/5) highlighted the dangers of complacency regarding the COVID situation. In Australia, we have so far been significantly protected by our island fortress geography, but it would be prudent to make some uncomfortable observations:
• COVID is increasing globally, not declining, and it is spreading to younger generations (against all predictions).
• The virus has demonstrated an insidious capacity to mutate, and may well mutate further so that vaccinations provide an inadequate defence.
• COVID is likely to stay with us on a global basis for the foreseeable future and may even increase further.

Our hotel quarantine facilities, although more or less coping, would be unlikely to provide an adequate protection if the situation deteriorated.

Faced with this bleak outlook, it would surely be wise to plan for a world in which international borders remain closed indefinitely. This does not prevent the leakage of a dangerously mutated virus from overseas. Good reason, therefore, for us to create purpose-built quarantine facilities to a world’s best practice standard, and preferably outside our capital cities. Offers of help along these lines have already been received (and rejected), and high-class facilities could easily be developed using available resources.

Not to plan ahead on this basis would demonstrate either negligence or a blind optimism. If we fail to act, our complacency could lead to a COVID expansion in Australia on a catastrophic, but avoidable scale.

David Stratford, Armadale, Vic

What’s in a name?

While I understand, and to a certain degree accept, the thrust of Helen Trinca’s article “As ideas go, hiding behind an alias is as false as they come” (1-2/5), Peter Singer’s pseudonymic journal may become the only unbiased public platform in which contrarian academic papers on climate change can be brought into the public domain for analytical review and debate.

I am of the opinion that there are worldwide academic scientists, engineers and chemists who are withholding significant research papers — that challenge and refute the climate change ideology and demonisation of carbon dioxide — due to the fear of losing tenure and career progression from neo-Marxist university administrations.

There is a body of anecdotal evidence indicating that the plant food CO2 is not the sole climate disruptor as has been portrayed. Singer’s Journal of Controversial Ideas will enable these contrarian academic viewpoints — historically low CO2 levels/solar activity/sunspots/fluorinated gases/elliptical orbits/magnetic field changes/etc — to be presented and prosecuted by the normal academic peer review processes and standards thereby providing the public, politicians and governments with a more measured, balanced and evidence-based approach for consideration on climate change.

David Spratt, Mosman, NSW

Hero in our midst

Thank you, Will Swanton, for the inspiring story of young Aussie Paralympic table tennis champion Jessy Chen (“Jessy’s journey from machete attack to Tokyo”, 30/4). After suffering the dreadful violence of a machete attack as a teenager that made his body paraplegic, no one would have blamed Jessy for giving up on life. As Jessy says, for a long time he felt empty, with nothing in his head, no goals, nothing to look forward to. Despair staring him in the face.

Jessy refused to succumb, grabbed a table tennis bat and will now represent his country at the highest level, the Tokyo Paralympic Games, a triumph of the human spirit that we should shout from the rooftops.

As a former coach in the Paralympic Athletics program at the Australian Institute of Sport, I have seen so many wonderful young lads and lasses fight their way back from the depths of darkest depression, overcoming emotional and physical obstacles that would floor the vast majority of us.

Jessy Chan. What an inspirational role model for all our young people who have been struggling to cope during these COVID pandemic times.

John Bell, Heidelberg Heights, Vic

Throwing money away

I am absolutely appalled at the Government’s new childcare funding announcement (“Women’s security ‘a major focus’ of federal budget as $1.7bn childcare package announced”, 2/5). Why should the taxes of singles, couples without children and retirees be given to families earning a half a million dollars a year and driving their children to childcare in BMWs? The economic argument simply doesn’t wash. All tax dollars given out by governments must be means tested. This is simply throwing money away in an attempt to win votes.

Evan Nichols, Rochedale, Qld