Common sense needs to prevail as restrictions relax

As restrictions relax, just remember it’s still a numbers game.

Ashley Robinson from the Alex Surf Club.

OPINION:

While COVID-19 has been devastating in so many ways. there will be some things we can all do better as we hopefully come out the other side of the most bizarre period in our lifetime.

I have found many positives along the way but also many oxymorons (maybe just take the oxy part off on a few of them).

At the time of writing, the State Government is in the process of changing some restrictions – hopefully with some degree of common sense attached to them.

I am still in May when writing this, so I will go on what I have seen so far.

People are still restricted in an entire licensed premises. But you can go to Woolies or Coles, line up outside, which is OK, but then be let into what resembles a rugby scrum inside to try and gather your sustenance.

Same for Bunnings — not that I go there much — but it’s the same: all orderly then it’s every person for themselves when you get in.

Then there’s haircuts: you can sit in a chair and get your hair done inches away from the provider for anything between 20 minutes to an hour but that is all OK.

And there is that bowtied genius that runs our airline who has been very clear that there will be no blanked-out seats on his planes because their hygiene is so much better than any other business.

Take the last time I flew with them: there was a used tissue in the seat pocket. And the time before that, there was a coffee cup, but apparently they have improved?

So let me get this right: I can sit beside a total stranger in a plane for two or three hours and that’s OK but can’t go to a good friend’s funeral if the crowd is over restricted numbers? Wow.

Now I don’t agree with our Premier much but I have no issue keeping the borders closed a little longer.

At least we’ve opened up inside Queensland so we can get the economy going.

But in saying that, there will always be whingers like me who aren’t happy and I acknowledge that some of the folk making the rules are doing it with the best intentions.

So I am willing to suck it up because at the end of the day, nothing is more important than our health.

I do have a couple of other observations through this period, though.

I reckon some people have used this COVID-19 to their advantage so that they do not have to exercise any social skills at all.

They have reached the ultimate pinnacle of their self-indulgence. They have climbed the mountain of self-importance and planted their colours.

I am talking about the exercise tracks on my early-morning walk or ride. Usually some people I would pass would look away or at their device so they didn’t have look at me — maybe because ugly could be contagious?

Well, now they have another reason. COVID-19 to them means you don’t have to say “hello” because you might catch the virus.

Sit on a plane, wrestle over frozen peas or a flatpack kitchen but bloody hell, don’t say “hello”.

The world is definitely a different place and there does seem to be a proliferation of morons around.

But as they say, it takes one to know one.