There is little appetite for a return of vaccine or mask mandates. And governments are not about to enforce new restrictions that have little public support. That’s the right call. But that’s not to say they should put up the white flag. | EDITORIAL
having now tested positive, many would have had it themselves. On Sunday, the cumulative death toll reached 10,000 and the vast majority died this year.
The figure is barely a fraction of death totals recorded in similar countries around the world – in Britain, and the same figure was recorded in just two months this year – but in Australia, a country that locked down for so long to keep its death toll low, the shift to daily double-digit death figures has been swift.If learning to live with the virus was the goal, then maybe that has been achieved. But scratch the surface of most schools, the health system and many households and workplaces, and the chaos that is playing out because of the pandemic, along with a bad flu season, is not hard to spot.
There is, however, little appetite for a return of vaccine or mask mandates. And governments are not about to enforce new restrictions that have little public support. That’s the right call. After nearly 2½ years of living with a pandemic, it’s hard to argue that people don’t have a good understanding of how to lower their risk of being infected and staying out of hospital.
But that’s not to say governments should put up the white flag. The months ahead are likely to be challenging.from the Burnet medical institute, because the COVID-19 virus is so rapidly changing genetically via mutations, it’s able to avoid gained immunity. They point out that this is leading to reinfections becoming increasingly common and not necessarily milder than the initial infection.
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