23 June

This is what people are not understanding about Covid. Every dot on that graph is you catching Covid once. Every time you do that, it may seem like a 'mild' disease, like a cold. But your chances of getting a permanent chronic condition or even catastrophic health event (like a stroke) increase hugely. It's cumulative. To paraphrase Paul Keating's line to John Hewson, that he was going to 'do him slowly', that's what Covid's genius is. It's doing us slowly, the ones who don't die immediately. HIV is the same, people with it could act for 6 or 7 years like nothing had happened. Then within 1-2 years after that, their health collapsed catastrophically, and then they were dead. There is no cure for ‘Long Covid’, a huge and growing number of serious medical conditions, many of which end peoples’ working lives, if not their actual life. It will certainly reduce their lifespan, even dramatically.