Dear ,

I thought you might be interested in knowing that the Health and Environment Committee of the Queensland Parliament  is holding hearings into the Public Health and Other Legislation (Extension of Expiring Provisions) Amendment Bill 2020 which the government is intending to extend to September 2021.

This is part of the legislation that gives the Queensland Chief Health Officer so much power.

You can submit and read details of the hearings on the parliamentary website at https://www.parliament.qld.gov.au/work-of-committees/committees/HEC/inquiries/current-inquiries/PublicHealth2020.

This is late notice as you only have until 5:00 pm tomorrow (although previous experience suggests they may take notice of submissions that don't quite make the deadline). We only became aware of this hearing yesterday so please forgive us for not letting you know earlier.

Submissions do not have to be overly complex, and neither do you have to be a Queensland citizen to make one. Sometimes it is the number of responses that a committee gets that is influential, not the quality. So if you want to make a contribution, wherever you live, please do not hesitate.

I have also had requests from a number of people on our distribution lists for information about the total number of deaths occurring in Australia. So I was delighted to discover a site called World Life Expectancy which provides this information in graphical format for most of the countries in the world, including Australia.

You can access it here: https://www.worldlifeexpectancy.com/selected-deaths-vs-covid-19-australia. I found it interesting that in the same period that we have had 909 COVID-19 deaths in Australia there has been 4,021 deaths from influenza and pneumonia - 4 times as many. 

I'd also like to recommend this article by Professors Ramesh Thakur and Deepak Nayyar "The Coronavirus Pandemic: India in Global Perspective", which, while it deals with COVID in India, has an excellent summary of the state of the science at the beginning.

Regards,

Graham Young
Executive Director