Commenting on the story: $240k for five days’ food: SA’s eye-watering medi-hotel bill

Having provided professional catering quotations to medi-hotels, the $240K +GST catering account recently cited is more than reasonable.

The need to provide meals around the clock for each fourteen day quarantine person adds up, especially the cost of trained kitchen staff starting at early hours in the morning, and premises operating twenty-four hours per day to ensure supply. – Eldert Hoebee

Commenting on the opinion piece: It’s time to move quarantine out of cities 

It’s a no-brainer. Governments need to bite the bullet. – Robert Warn

Commenting on the story: Facial recognition, GPS tracking as SA Govt monitors home quarantine

There’s a saying that tyrants always come in the guise of a protector.

The app the state government is having developed for monitoring anyone that someone has decided could have been infected by Covid-19 is like home detention with a compulsory GPS ankle bracelet, but enforced by your smart phone. It is scary because it can be imposed, and used to punish, without any process to determine whether there is any real risk.

Has there been a single case in SA of a person told to quarantine passing it on to anyone else? It is doubly scary because with the app developed it costs nothing to the people imposing it to add another person to the list of those it is imposed on, so there is no incentive for them to restrict its use to those where its use is justified. Your own phone does their work for them. And it is triply scary for what it will be repurposed to be used for once the coronavirus panic is over.

The immediate concern is that a lot of people will be so afraid of being trapped into tightly enforced restrictions on what they can and can’t do, just because of the remote risk that someone they might have been near might have had Covid-19, and even more remotely might have passed it to them just because they were in the same place at about the same time, that they will avoid participating in contact tracing.

The problem in this country is not community transmission. It is not the behaviour of the public. Over and over again in state after state it has been the running of quarantine hotels. The people running them need to stop trying to misdirect from that and look at the question of their own competence. – Gordon Drennan

Commenting on the story: Barossa vineyard named among world’s best

Regarding a Barossa pearl, whilst respecting Dean Hewitson’s skill in producing a great wine from these old Barossa Mourverdre, it’s a pity that Leon Koch, with his late father Ross, and now with his wife and daughters, don’t get the recognition they deserve for looking after these old vines over many years.

I had hoped Dean would have edified Leon and his family more – they are very good custodians of these rare vines. Why not do a story on Leon and Carlene’s daughters who now look after these vines. – Rick Burge