Today is the seventh day of the Lunar New Year. Happy Lunar New Year to all!
With Omicron still dominating, there were not many celebration activities this year. There were not many people running around in Chinatowns around Australia. The usual full-house Chinese restaurants and lion dances were replaced by queues for takeaway orders. People simply celebrated at home. Home again becomes a centre of activities in a Covidnormal society.
Australia has survived the peak of Omicron and remains intact, with the total infected number falling below 20,000 a day. The number of Covid-19 patients hospitalized fell below 4,000 with less than 600 in ICU. We are grateful that things are going better here.
However, the threat is still there.
The impact of the reopening of schools will become visible in the coming days. The rate of taking up the third dose still needs to pick up. The 5-11 child vaccination rate has to be improved. The rules of isolation have yet to be updated to make sure the society is safe but functional. All levels of government should work harder on this.
The multicultural aged care services have voiced out their problems. Many CALD aged care facilities depend heavily on overseas workers. Many have indicated a severe shortage of multilingual workers. Some CALD aged care facilities claim to have only 3 workers taking care of over 100 residents.
CALD communities are usually overlooked by mainstream communities and politicians seldom want to tackle issues related to them except at a time of election. The federal election is coming soon. I think that the needs of CALD communities during the Covid-19 pandemic have been unnoticed. We should stand out and voice out louder at this time to fight for the right to be heard.
Please let us know what you think the governments must address. You can email us what you think is the priority issues that should be addressed by the various governments.
Regards,
Raymond Chow
Publisher, BlessingCALD