1 October

White Cliff opal mines from the air. The more they learn about Covid, the more they realise this is how the virus sees us. Most of us if we catch it, won’t spread it. But a few of us will spread it to lots of others. Super-spreaders. Nobody knows why (the microbes do). The virus goes looking for these, like a miner looks for a seam of opal or gold. Mostly they won’t find any, but then occasionally they hit the jackpot. When the virus hits a super-spreader, it creates a cluster. If you can stamp out clusters, you win. If you let the virus rip you can’t track the clusters, why lockdowns are an important component of our public health response.