Visited the international airport terminal in Auckland a week ago and was shocked to find the only QR codes on display were at the two or three food outlets still in operation. If/when a new Covid variant comes into the country it'll be important to identity potential exposures as quickly as possible, so surely international travel terminals should still be requiring people to record their visits?

The message was totally lost on me I must admit, but it could be worse. I'm old enough to remember an OSH advertisement that featured a couple of ballroom dancers with a tagline that said something about taking safe steps...
Someone must have told their advertising gurus that people turn off as soon as you mention health and safety, so they make very sure that they don't.

Hi Grant, In your view, if a workplace suffers an outbreak of Covid-19 cases, would you expect WorkSafe to investigate, just as it would if there was an outbreak of other harms arising from health-related exposure? Or does the fact that this is a society-wide issue take the heat off PCBUs to some extent?

Totally agree Mike. Occ physicians are your one-stop shop for workplace health issues - experts in both medicine and workplace exposures. The original specialist may well have been flying a kite, based on his/her text book knowledge of the things that can cause lung damage, but he/she probably didn't have the inside knowledge to know whether the controls you have in place are sufficient to prevent harm. If you call in an occ med they will tell you if you've got a problem, but won't try to sell you anything you may not need, and should help set everyone's minds at rest.

Prison officers' work is hardly sedentary. Most spend hours on their feet and may walk several miles in the course of a shift. The new prison at Paremoremo, for instance, has some VERY long corridors. So high sugar content may be less of a problem for them than for many of us.

I take your point Phil, but the fact is - unlike spray cans - the government already places a truckload of conditions on the sale of cigarettes to protect the health of potential purchasers. And one of the disincentives to purchase that it uses - excise duty - is what created the black market and made dairy owners vulnerable in the first place. Add to this the fact that most dairy robberies - including this week's near-fatal stabbing - are committed by people too young to legally purchase cigarettes, and I think we have a clear case of the government creating a risk and requiring dairy owners to manage it. It's easy to say they should just stop selling the things if they can't protect themselves, but dairies operate on very small margins, and for the owners I spoke to it was a commercial necessity. One of them told me he'd be happy to stop selling cigarettes, but only if other dairies had to do the same, because otherwise he'd lose a big chunk of his customer base.