Kindly Yours

  Oh, the habits of the past and what was a comforting routine is no more. Many years ago, it was a casual relaxing pleasure to do something easy and different from weekdays, on a Saturday morning.  Simple regimes like going through the newspapers. Or catching up with people in a cafe. And driving like crazy just to try eating some hyped up dish, even before Instagrammable culinary. On a small island, it was doable, until the escalating traffic jams made me think twice. The pleasure and reward were to catch up with fellow human beings. The underlying pace was that it was unstructured, flexible and had delightful changes in store - surprise me! Across the plains of Greater Sydney, I had to plan arrival and appointment times, for distances were greater to transverse and traffic jams even more congested at particular hours. Now the newsagent is a sad shade of its past activity and future possibilities.  The dominance and ease of online publications have decimated the pr...

  We are coming to the second anniversary of the arrival of C19 in late January 2020. Amazingly, the number of infections in most states of Australia have skyrocketed beyond modelling, imagination and expectation. Cases of the latest mutated strain are also spiking in at least tens of thousands across nations which have governments embracing Omicron. So it does all fall logically like the snow in a severe northern hemisphere winter. Back in greater Sydney, the reporting of infections have become muddled in this new year - are they from self test kits, public testing facilities, from Omicron or from false online data input? Who knows, we are not told of useful breakdown in information anymore. What we experience instead are more alerts about we having visited venues at the same time as confirmed infectees (through use of the QR code scanning) and that more of people we directly know are down with infections. For about two years, we knew confidently how to get help if we got in...

  There is a growing irony when you live under a government that wants the public to embrace Covid. Busibess venues are open but customers are more reluctant to use them. Business venues are open but there are not enough stocks and staff available to viably keep them open. We are free to travel but subject to a whole host of procedures that restrict our other freedoms. We have minimal restrictions compared to days of lockdowns, travel permits and border closures- but we find ourselves more willing to stay home and observe what the heck is actually happening with the C and its implications. We are told to test, when we have symptoms, but it is getting more challenging to be tested. If the Omicron has less severity, then why are we still pushed to continue to test and get more vaccine jabs? Governments can tell us to ride the wave over significant spikes in new mutations of C.  If we get infected, we are however told mostly to treat ourselves with painkillers - and not to ...

  What are the likely near future public health scenarios across Greater Sydney in the next few weeks leading to the arrival of The Lunar New Year of the Water Tiger, on Feb 1? Already 20 pc of PCR testing are resulting in positive infections.  The NSW capacity for PCR testing is cracking up, so lower testing numbers will give skewed and underreported figures of infection.  PCR test results are taking more than 48 hours by pathology providers to inform those tested - increasing risks of those already infected to spread an already more infectious Omicron, before the test results are communicated to them. The push by Sco Mo and Perrotett for the public to utilise RAT testing, which can be inaccurate and incorrectly applied by untrained individuals, has already run into a wall of lack of stocks to buy, rising test kit prices and inaffordability of many to buy them. The current focus by government here on testing, significantly misses what should be done more to reduce the...