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| Zero Covid, a spinning wheel policy |
LETTER TO SOUTH CHINA MORNING POST:
Last night I watched an Australian Football League semi-final played at the Melbourne Cricket Ground in front of a crowd of 90,612. There were no Covid restrictions and no masks in the crowd. Yet there will be no "soaring caseloads", as our Sports Secretary Kevin Yeung fears for our open-air sports here.
How do I know this? Because Australia has had such crowds all across the country in every single state, every single weekend since the beginning of the season. Covid caseloads have not "soared"; hospitalisations have remained steady and are now declining; Australian Covid deaths per million are similar to ours here, despite all our restrictions.
Yet our officials remain fixated on mandates and quarantine, like deer in the headlights, frozen in fear.
Our Secretary of Health, Lo Chung-mau, boasts that he is proud of our go-it-alone policy. But shouldn't he at least have a look at real-time, real-life examples outside? Shouldn't his colleague in charge of Sports have a look at what Australia has been doing throughout its winter? And might they then not conclude that a "Closed-loop Sevens” is bizarre, unwieldy, unattractive and, above all, unnecessary? And that fears around a Marathon, with fully-vaccinated, super-healthy participants, are even more overblown?
Australia has had football attendances, over six months, averaging four times what is being planned for our "Closed-loop Sevens", and they are packed in more tightly than runners in a marathon. And still no Covid superspread. Isn't that cause for at least some attention from our fearful bureaucrats?
I join all those others in your pages calling for scrapping of our mandates, cancelling our quarantines, ditching our "Zero Covid Policy".
To our chief executive — and to paraphrase Reagan to Gorbachev — "Mr Lee, tear down this policy!"
Peter Forsythe, etc…
