Conspiracists, anarchists and Covid-deniers might well feel they can cynically ignore the unfolding tragedy that is happening over the ditch and around the rest of the planet.
Conspiracists, anarchists and Covid-deniers might well feel they can cynically ignore the unfolding tragedy that is happening over the ditch and around the rest of the planet.
We need to take Covid seriously
This week Minister of Health Chris Hipkins confirmed that "Contact tracing is a key pillar in our defence against Covid 19". Why then are we not taking it more seriously? Have we really become a town of Covid- deniers? It seems so.
Evidenceof this can be seen on our high street and nearly every second business and cafe in the town. Why is it that so few establishments have the proper QR scan codes displayed and ready to use? Some were apologetic, others didn't know what I was asking about, still others were unconcerned that their displayed QR codes failed to work with the Covid-19 tracing app. Yes, they had some sort of a QR code from somewhere, but it was useless.
New Zealand's hiatus in community infection is definitely not a holiday from Covid. It is, however, an opportunity to be better prepared for the onslaught of contact tracing downloads and scanning that will occur when new cases of community transmission inevitably emerge.
Conspiracists, anarchists and Covid-deniers might well feel they can cynically ignore the unfolding tragedy that is happening over the ditch and around the rest of the planet.
For the rest of us, if we hope to remain smugly secure in our privileged isolation, we need to be proactive and take the possibility of contact tracing seriously.
Mainstreet Whanganui, the local council and the Chamber of Commerce and industry can do more to ensure their partners display traceable QR scan codes. Customers can question business owners and if need be, take their business elsewhere.
JOHN MALCOLM St Johns Hill
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Growth means more people
The policies of National's latest leader, Judith Collins, is more of the same National rhetoric - "Grow the economy".
There is no hope for Aotearoa/New Zealand and the rest of the world with the flawed logic that relies on more growth.
Simply, more growth means more people on spaceship Earth using more resources, which are finite, creating more waste and probably more importantly vast quantities of CO2 that ends up heating an already too warm atmosphere.
In her first speech Judith Collins gave her commitment, if National is in Government, that growing the economy is the answer to the Covid-19 crisis and the loss of trade and travel that it has brought.
Has she not been paying attention? Climate change is ultimately a far bigger threat than the Covid-19 virus. No matter how much we grow the economy it cannot mitigate or stop the virus or future flooding, such as we have seen in the past week in Northland and the East Coast.
Collins and friends believe that building roads of significance to National will solve traffic problems. No it won't. Every time a new road is built to reduce congestion somewhere it attracts more traffic, only encouraging more cars and trucks and in the process supporting vehicle dealers selling more and all increasing our CO2 output.
When Collins was explaining where her $31 billion was being spent there wasn't one word that I could detect about mitigating climate change but plenty on ways to accelerate it.
