As a result, the political and health sector focus is starting to turn towards long-term management of COVID-19, as the need for short-term crisis management recedes, hopefully permanently.

Dr David Durrheim, a Hunter New England public health physician whose insights and observations have become part of the region's coronavirus conversation, has suggested that the elderly and the medically compromised might have to continue self-isolating for longer than everyone else if the bulk of society is to emerge from its forced hibernation while minimising the risk of further COVID-19 death and illness.

READ MORE: No new Hunter cases for second day in a row

As Dr Durrheim says, there are no easy solutions to the quandry we find ourselves in.

Absent a vaccine, all of the decisions that Australia and other countries make in terms of coronavirus controls are by definition trade-offs between risk and reward.

Cost-benefit calculations, in other words.

From the state's perspective, somehow isolating the elderly, and those with medical conditions, makes sense as a means of minimising both the impact of the disease, and its toll on the health system.

That's the benefit.

But as many are finding after just a month of the "stay at home" mantra that has unquestionably helped to "flatten the curve" of infections, going without the usual daily physical interactions of everyday life has an impact that must surely grow the longer it continues. That's the cost.

It was widely said in the early days of the crisis that Australia would never adopt the sort of harsh quarantine measures enforced once China admitted the existence of the virus in Wuhan.

Our largely obedient acceptance of business shuttering and social distancing has shown we will accept quite a lot in the name of public health and safety.

Still, it's one thing to embrace such policies as necessity, on a one-in, all-in, "Team Australia" basis.

It's another entirely, though, to tell the old and the sick they must stay out of the way to let the rest of the nation find its feet in our new virus-afflicted world.

Much will depend on the progress towards a vaccine, because even if Australia was to completely eliminate COVID-19, it could only maintain such a status by locking its gates to the outside world.

That sort of self-isolation would carry too great a cost.

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