Opinion: We’re living through something truly historical, and for that reason, something historically awful. But with that in mind, it’s worth us recognising how relatively well we’ve fared, writes Waleed Aly
It is the custom of opinion pieces like this one to thunder at something or other. To parse what is objectionable in public life and invite readers into some communal complaint. Done well, this is an important cog in the machine of democratic accountability and improvement, and it seems especially suited to our times of generational calamity: chiefly climate change and the pandemic.
We might, for example, have been afflicted with a far worse virus. Others certainly have been. Here I could recount all kinds of stories of the medieval plague, of the European cities whose populations have still not recovered. But really, we need only go back to the most recent major pandemic to grasp our relative fortune.
I’m grateful, too, that COVID’s Delta variant didn’t arrive until this year. Victorians will recall the pain of last year’s second wave, which took some four months to bring under control. Victoria drove its cases back to zero partly because there was no vaccine available, and because doing so ultimately proved feasible. But imagine if that outbreak was of the Delta variant instead of the pre-Alpha mutant strain that it was.
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