We must show our humanity behind our masks

I suggest three. Firstly we may need to say more. We need to realise that, if we smile to a passerby, an additional friendly remark may be required to ensure our goodwill is apparent.

Secondly, we may need to use our whole body more in gestures that can be seen to convey what the mouth can no longer signal.

And thirdly, we may increasingly use food we've cooked ourselves as a potential gift to express physically what we can no longer do with our shared and intimate closeness.

We will find other ways, but recognising our new source of grief, the human species will be creative in response, of this I have no doubt.

Perhaps this is another reason for our reliance, more than ever, on our arts community, although our government seems still not to have realised this.

A few weeks ago I began researching face mask construction and found a pattern recommendation of fabric layers similar to those given by Betty Clark (page 12, August 7). However there is one extremely important addition, a bendable metal piece across the nose. This allows the fit to be adjusted so that no air escapes around the nose toward the eyes. Such a gap can decrease the effectiveness of the mask by 50 per cent or more as well as fog your glasses. A pipe cleaner could be used, but I prefer a 6-7 mm wide double strip of aluminium flashing about 8 centimetres long in the top of the mask preferably between the fabric layers. Strips cut out of disposable aluminium bakeware would likely also work. Quilters Cotton was reported to be the best material for the middle layer.

Re: "Fake names don't help" (August 8, p5) There are a number of reasons why people may be reluctant to publicly provide their real names and numbers to venues. While it is easy to understand the reason why these things are required, the response to those providing fake names by Professor Kelly that "we are in a pandemic" doesn't change the fact that for some people, the greatest threat to their lives is not COVID-19. Indeed, the likelihood of them suffering from COVID is probably significantly less in Canberra right now than the very real threat of suffering violence at the hands of an (ex-)intimate partner. There are also many other members of our community whose private information should not be made public - judges, police officers, corrections staff to name a few. Should they not be able to dine out because venues are not able or willing to provide a private space to give information? This does not remove the need to be able to contact trace, but venues should be providing all patrons with a private/secure way to record personal details so that we can all stay safe.

Has the lede (or should I say lead) been buried in the story "Lead paint ... forces children out of classrooms?" (August 6). We learn late in the piece that an April 2019 study recommended "immediate action should be taken to reduce exposure risk". Instead, windows in eight classrooms were replaced some 15 months later. In the subsequent article we are told the Education Directorate responded to the reports recommendations by mid-2019. If the windows were only replaced in July 2020, can the Education Directorate clarify what work has been completed during the last 12 months to reduce the health risk to students?

Why is our society so fixated on enabling sporting audiences to gather by the thousands, increasing COVID-19 risks, when matches can be played and broadcast without audiences?

The huge effort that goes into mounting unnecessary professional spectator events could surely be better spent on more effective public communication to support virus mitigation policies.

As a form of community protection, professional codes should find the spirit to volunteer an audience "time out" until this pandemic is controlled. Keep playing the games if they have to (and the need for that is highly debatable), just leave the people out for now.

If it were a choice between me getting COVID-19 and my children never being able to find work and being poor for the rest of their lives, I would take my chances. Sure, left-leaning countries, including some Pacific banana republics, can continue to suppress infection rates if they stay shut off from themselves and the rest of the world, but at what cost? Suicide, poverty, declining quality and availability of health care, and the end of the social interaction that makes life worth living, are just some of the costs.

It's interesting in his letter of August 7 that Gary Mack didn't mention Sweden by name. Formerly the go-to country and poster state for left-wing progressives, it was lumped in with "some in Europe [that] are run by right-wingers who place greed and selfishness above all else, including human life". That's the price of not doing as you're told just once, but with its COVID death rates down to almost zero and life going on pretty much as normal, I think it's a price they're prepared to pay.

Earlier this year, a spirit from the other side gave me a rare moment of clairvoyant lucidity. It brought forth two "scenarios". In one scenario, Trump loses the November election, declares the vote invalid, stays in the White House, and calls out the troops. In the other scenario, Trump wins the election.

But, no matter whether Trump loses and calls out the troops, or he wins, some of the states where sanity prevails, like New York state, and those on the Pacific Coast, will no longer wish to be subject to a deranged president. They will secede, either to become sovereign states in their own right, or urge Canada to accept them.

What will actually happen remains unknown, because a cloud descended, occluding the clairvoyant vision.

The selective silence from the Prime Minister, and Senator Seselja, about the sudden, arbitrary NSW border closure at Albury to returning Canberra citizens with a valid permit to enter the ACT is noticeable. This is in stark contrast to the Prime Minister and other Minister's condemnation of Queensland, Western Australia and the Northern Territory over the border closures. Let's not play politics with the pandemic.

Doug Rankin talked about shameful journalists (Letters, August 8) for their pursuit of the Victorian Premier over his handling of the COVID-19 pandemic. I must have been watching a different press conference, because I saw journalists seeking to elicit the facts but being frustrated by a Premier who would not answer even the most basic of questions.

The gross mismanagement by the Victorian government of the hotel quarantine process led to the escape of the virus into the community, and their inability to establish and operate an effective tracing program has impacted their ability to bring it back under control.

Their failures now impact every Australian and the community is entitled to ask questions of those responsible and to get honest and timely answers. I commend those journalists and hope they continue to pursue the facts.

One of the original reasons for the establishment of superannuation in Australia was to encourage individuals to build a safety net for retirement, which not only protected the retiree, but also shifted an enormous amount of financial responsibility from the public purse to private savings. Recent figures show that this was being achieved - in 2019 there were more self-funded retirees in the 60 to 64 age group than there were pensioners.

The insanity of the Morrison government in allowing people direct access to their super funds means that we now have around 600,000 people with no super at all and no prospects for it in the future - a great number of them women. In one stupid move, the Parliament has shifted a great deal of the debt of this pandemic from the national budget to the individual.

The debt has moved from something which could have been incrementally managed nationally, to a future financial disaster. The current flock of parliamentarians will be long dead before this chicken comes home to roost, but when it does it will be the precise disaster Paul Keating was trying to avoid.

Rather than Beirut, the biggest non-nuclear explosion in history is probably the RAF Fauld explosion on November 27, 1944, when more than 3500 tonnes of stored underground munitions exploded at Fauld in Staffordshire, UK. The crater, 230 metres across and 91 metres deep, remains.

Suitable replacements for the obloquy "Karen" (Letters August 4 and 6). Female: Hillary. Male: Malcolm. Obvious, really.

John Howarth (Letters, August 7) asks "why Queensland?, why?". Well John, it is God's country up there and God clearly does indeed move in mysterious ways.

President Trump is reported as saying that the virus "is going away. It will go away like things go away". One can only hope that the American voter will see him as one of these things.

Your correspondent Michael Lane of St Ives (Letters, August 7) says newspapers like The Canberra Times shouldn't publish the views of former political leaders like Kevin Rudd and John Hewson because they are losers who lost elections. Would this North Shore totalitarian also silence John Howard? After all, Mr Howard even lost his own seat when his government was defeated in 2007.

I support the call by Rick Smyth (letter 8 August) for a permanent Aboriginal Embassy in Canberra, not necessarily on the same site, but somewhere near Parliament House. Twenty years ago I wrote to this paper proposing a permanent embassy, and suggested it should be designed as a large tent. It seemed like a good idea at the time, and probably still is.

Regarding your reader's letter (August 8) that there should be a permanent Indigenous embassy built on the site of their tent embassy, what about gifting them the Old Parliament House building? They could repurpose the rooms, with the two chambers perhaps being used for men's business and women's business.

I'm not an anti-masker, nor do I wish to defend those in Victoria protesting their "right" not to wear a mask. But after reading Mike Quirk's letter ("Right wing agitators", August 8), the thought occurred to me that if it's appropriate for police to arrest leaders of the anti-mask movement then it should also be appropriate for them to arrest Andrew Bolt et al on similar grounds - incitement.

In "Advice on face masks?" (CT, Aug 8, p14) you state that Sweden has a low rate of infection. This is incorrect. Sweden has more than 8000 cases per million population, one of the highest infection rates in western Europe. In comparison, the UK has fewer than 5000 cases per million, and Denmark about 2500 cases per million.

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