A critical check missing

August 8, 2021 â€" 12.03am

Illustration: Matt GoldingCredit:

To submit a letter to The Age, email letters@theage.com.au. Please include your home address and telephone number.A critical check missing

Over the past 18 months Australia has slowly but surely been building its arsenal against COVID-19: Quarantine, lockdowns, masks, hand sanitisation and more recently check-in protocols and vaccines have provided enormous assistance in tackling the Delta variant.

However, one simple and key detection method has really dropped off. Temperature checks. At one point during 2020, shopping centres, workplaces, schools, sporting venues and restaurants were beginning to resemble Singapore Airport.

Visible temperature checking apparatus, which invoked an element of trepidation and no doubt prevented some with flu-like symptoms from attending these venues, now seem to have disappeared.

It is now time to reintroduce this critical check and it will provide greater confidence to many of us that are now fatigued from coming in and out of lockdowns.
Pat Rankin, South Melbourne

Don’t forget the teachers
With another lockdown under way, there is â€" again â€" focus on students and how they’re going, but we do seem to forget teachers in all of this. I was talking to my daughter’s teacher recently and he was saying the lockdowns are so debilitating, as he doesn’t get to see his class enough.

What with last year and now this year, he’s heartbroken he’s missing out on teaching a really good class. It must be the same for a lot of teachers. Don’t forget how hard it is for them to not see their kids every day.
David Jeffery, East Geelong

He’s not lecturing us
Your correspondent (“Let me decide, Premier”, Letters, 6/8) should note that we are not being lectured to by a politician, we are being informed by the Victorian Premier how our state is being governed.

Government is for the collective interest of all Victorians, not just for those who prize their personal interests above everyone else’s.

Those who don’t like the government can exercise their democratic right to vote against it at the next election or move to another state that values individual liberty. NSW, perhaps?
Linda Skinner, Mooroolbark

I know where I’ll be
The census ads urge us to fill in our form early if we know where we will be on Tuesday. Easy.

And, given the few rubbish bins put out in my street for collection today, there may be a disproportionate number of holiday homes occupied mid-week in winter.
Heather Barker, Albert Park

Her movie of choice?
Gladys Berejiklian must be a fan of Groundhog Day. Every day she reports hundreds of new cases (on Saturday a record 319), prepares us to expect worse the next day and stubbornly refuses to take any meaningful action.

She whitewashes her lack of a plan by focusing on vaccinations. Vaccinations will take months to make an impact.

As a doctor, I do not accept NSW is listening to uniform medical advice.
Ralph Frank, Malvern East

Impossible to refute
Sam Biondo’s piece on cannabis reform is accessible, comprehensive and impossible to refute (“Victoria lags on reducing drug harm”, Comment, 6/8). Criminalisation does far more harm to society than use of cannabis ever could, including in lost potential revenue and wasted public funds and man-hours.

Police arguments made to the recent parliamentary inquiry favouring continued criminalisation (evoking mental health issues and increased crime and driving offences) were either wan or illogical.

While inadequate on their own merits, none of them can withstand a very simple fact: the harms they outline are already made worse, a hundred times worse, by alcohol, a drug we regulate rather than prohibit. Why do the police catastrophise so?

Biondo tells us that $2.4 billion is spent nationally on “law and order” aspects of cannabis prohibition every year. That’s hedge-fund and tech-unicorn territory. Talk about potential lost revenue.
Scott Hurley, Brighton East

Let’s swap jobs ...
Hungry Jack founder Jack Cowin is the latest business leader to offer us advice on the pandemic (“We must learn to live with virus: Hungry Jack’s founder”, Business, 6/8).

As an immunologist, I would not like to see his advice adopted, but perhaps we can do a trade. If he lets me and my colleagues run his business for a while, perhaps we could be persuaded to let him determine COVID policy.
Andrew Collins, Dromana

Cold comfort
From the beginning, COVID-19 has caused hospitalisation and death, and from the beginning, hospital systems have been threatened. The Delta variant compounds all this.

I am about to be fully vaccinated with the second AstraZeneca dose, which will, according to the evidence, offer protection. But it won’t protect me from any other emergency that may arise.

When our health system is overwhelmed, if I can’t get a bed in a hospital, my full COVID protection won’t mean much. We feel for those in Sydney hospitals. It could be happening here again.

Enormous thanks to VicHealth and all frontline health workers. They live with this threat every day.
Annette Signorini, Newport

The weight of numbers
With the Olympics considered a contest between nations rather than individuals, absolute medal counts are meaningless because populous countries have an unearned advantage.

There needs to be a handicap as is common in many sports. A fair measure of a nation’s sporting prowess could be the ratio of total medal count to population size.
Ralph Bohmer, St Kilda West

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