14 October

Was chatting to one of Australia’s leading virologists yesterday, about how he sees Covid panning out in the years ahead, with the ‘living with Covid’ idea. For comparison, in a bad flu year in Australia, we get about 250,000 cases of flu, which stresses the health system badly. (Probably quite a few more than this too, as we don’t test for flu.) Given Covid is many times as infectious as flu, some virologists are predicting 5-7 million cases of Covid per year in Australia, in years to come. The UK currently experiencing the stupidity of ‘live with the virus’ (link), and finding it’s nothing ‘like the flu’ at all. (For the economically obsessed, flu costs Australian businesses about $7 billion a year. Covid will be many multiples of that, at these projections.)