Once again, our State Government has ordered that we minimise our outside activities and stay at home whenever possible. In view of the huge rise in numbers of people contracting the dreaded CORONA 19 virus, I doubt if any one of us would argue against that. So as far as indoor classes go, we will need to wait for at least another 6 weeks.

A great deal of work had been done by Cristina Varsavsky, your Course Coordinator to have some classes re-start on July 20, but now will need wait it out until it is safe to leave our homes again.

 Also, we needed to come up with action plans for notification to authorities should one of our members contract the disease, along with how we would cover sanitisation and cleaning of buildings owned by Knox City Council. These needed to be approved before we could to use their premises. Other venues required similar undertakings. Any classes restarting would be operating under the strict social distancing and numbers allowable rules laid down by the Dept of Health and Human Services.

 A few weeks ago, with the COVID 19 numbers dropping, some of us were looking forward to re-joining their classes again for face to face contact with friends. Similarly, there were some of us who were taking a more cautious approach and were prepared to wait.

At this stage we will have to hold out and see how the people of Melbourne respond to this latest outbreak. Therefore, we cannot give any indication as to when we can re-start face to face classes. It would be nice to think that we will be back for Term 4, but there is no guarantee.

In the meantime, we still have classes operating using Zoom and a few of the outdoor activities are continuing, using Social Distancing & keeping to groups of two.

Stay Home & Stay Well

Lawrie Gaylard