One rule for Salamanca, one for TSO
I WENT to Salamanca Market on Saturday where we were all required to wear masks. In the previous week I attended a spectacular performance of the Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra at The Odeon where no masks were required. The theatre was full and, while we waited to get in, we all stood together in a long queue with no social distancing. I’m not against masks at all but it seems a bit contrary to insist on them at an outdoor event and not at an indoor event where I was much closer to other people for the entire duration of the event. Is it simply about numbers?
Pen Taylor Lindisfarne
THANK YOU
I WOULD like to thank the Tasmanian government for ensuring 90 per cent of Tasmanians are vaccinated before opening up. That demonstrates an understanding that you need to protect this island state and that you are not solely following arbitrary orders from the feds and you are prepared to made the hard and probably unpopular decision to protect your state.
Also thank you for allowing everyone over 60 to get Moderna and Pfizer. I got my jab yesterday at Huonville pharmacy and they were lovely!
I fully support you putting people’s health ahead of profits and business that some are demanding to place as first consideration instead. Not very nice to think money is more important than lives. PM Morrison has it wrong forcing states to open, as he is with many other things he’s done. It’s not about party politics, it’s human lives.
Maria Riedl Battery Point
LIFE AND THE VIRUS
COVID has impacted significantly on my extended family, due to relatives,
including grandchildren, living overseas, or interstate. There has been a Covid wedding, Covid funerals, Covid education; excess of Zoom, and Teams meetings. There has been working from home, and looking after Covid patients in intensive care overseas. There have been holidays cancelled, smaller beach group walks, more stair climbing due to lift restrictions, wearing of masks and lots of use of Check in Apps, house renovations, and dog walking. There has been frustration about varying rules and restrictions, and inconsistencies within Australia. Pets have become essential friends.
All this is the experience of many. In Tasmania, we have been relatively fortunate, but this can easily change. Community members who meet large numbers of people should be required to be vaccinated for the greater good unless they have an underlying health condition. I was horrified that my taxi driver earlier in the week had not been vaccinated.
Unless they are exempt, due to a health condition, I believe that all taxi drivers, bus drivers, front of house retail staff, educators and trades workers should all be vaccinated to protect the health of others as we move to opening our borders.
The Tasmanian Health system could not cope with a Covid outbreak, especially when Hobart Private already turns away people they deem as elderly, as they have done to my nearly 95-year -old father twice, and elderly cancer patients have to wait over eight hours for attention from emergency at the Royal Hobart Hospital.
Deborah Beswick Howrah
UNHAPPY CHRISTMAS
OUR Premier has joined the rest of the premiers by trying to lock up our state which relies heavily on tourism because we might have a hundred deaths in six months time which is .00018 per cent of our population. Tasmanians with fam
ily interstate can’t have Christmas with them and we will be locked up and suffering closed businesses and huge job losses as the federal government stops payments because the state premiers agreed to open up at 80 per cent.
Jan Smith Blackmans Bay
DISGRACEFUL CONDUCT
I AM feeling gobsmacked and angry. Given the effort the state government and it’s agencies have gone to, to control the importation of Covid, there can be no excuses for a 15-year-old waltzing around the local community and getting visits from family and friends, whilst supposedly in isolation. Throw the book at the teenager and anyone who visited him. The human and economic cost of Covid getting out and about in Tasmania will be catastrophic. Send a strong and clear message to others. Utterly disgraceful conduct.
Mike Radburn
Sandy Bay