FOUR weeks ago tomorrow, the Hunter Region recorded its most recent COVID-19 case, a returning traveller whose illness was confirmed on Saturday, May 9.
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The Johns Hopkins University global coronavirus dashboard shows Australia has added 301 cases since then, with an average of 11 new cases a day taking the total to 7240.
The NSW government said yesterday that the state had gone eight days without a "community-transmitted" case of COVID-19: two new cases recorded on Wednesday were returning travellers.
As we have previously pointed out, Australia is doing extremely well by international comparison. We are down to 64th position by case totals, and the Hunter is far from the only part of the nation to be effectively COVID-free.
CORONAVIRUS ROLL CALL
- UK's unenviable tally of 40,000 official deaths and more suspected
- Patronage limits mean space in Italy's usually crowded art galleries
- New Zealand's COVID elimination day: June 15
- Sweden's coronavirus strategy architect says he got it wrong
- Conflict of interest questions over PM's National COVID Coordination Commission
Monday, though, is a public holiday, Queensland and Western Australia excepted.
With last Friday's National Cabinet meeting clearing the way for eased travel restrictions, health authorities are bracing themselves for a potential spike of new cases, even with the social distancing and cleanliness regimes that most people have incorporated into their everyday lives.
Australia's otherwise draconian economic shutdown has proved as successful - if not more so - than anyone could have hoped.
But such drastic medicine is too expensive, and too socially damaging, to prescribe long-term.
We may have little choice but to learn to live with the virus.
Other countries are also reopening their economies, and many are doing so with far more active coronavirus cases than we have in Australia.
The "balancing act" that our politicians and their advisers talked of early on when discussing lockdown exit strategies looks a lot more troubling in real life than it did in theory.
In Brazil, authorities have "aggressively" pushed shops to reopen this week, even as Wednesday saw a record one-day total of 1349 COVID-19 deaths and a near-record increase of 28,600 new cases.
Asked what message he had for the families of victims, President Jair Bolsonaro reportedly said: "I regret all the dead, but it is everyone's destiny [to die, even without the virus]."
On April 20, when asked about the increasing number of deaths in Brazil by COVID-19 when the toll had reached 2500, Bolsonaro said that he did not work as a gravedigger. A week later, when questioned on the same matter as the toll reached 5000, he said: 'So what? Im sorry, but what do you want me to do?' adding that he could not 'work miracles'.
- La Prensa Latina Media, June 2
Even allowing for cultural differences, we must hope that such glib resignation is never heard on these shores.
Shores that look increasingly like this nation's best protection against the worst of a still unfolding global catastrophe.
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