1 October

Brendan is one of the leading pandemic authorities in the world. We need to listen a lot more to people like him. He’s 100% right that ‘Australians think it’s over’. And they think it’s over mostly because the previous PM wanted them to think that before Christmas last year, so he could go into an election looking like the man who ended the pandemic, with us having had lovely holidays over Christmas on his behalf. 25,000 Australians are projected to die from Covid this year. If that doesn’t appall you, I think you should be deeply ashamed. (For the slogan-infected ‘just like the flu’ folk, about 600 people die of flu in an average flu year.) It’s also vital to understand that how we all behave makes these deaths happen. We spread it, to the people who die, in our social activity, even if our own case is ‘mild’. And Covid is not mild for anybody, it might just look that way in the short term.