VICTORIA'S surge of coronavirus cases is another symbol of how rapidly this extremely infectious disease can spread once it breaks out in a community.
Most older Australians, well aware that the impact of COVID-19 tends to be heavier on them than the young, have by and large taken the social distancing warnings seriously.
But as a series of recent images from inside capital city nightclubs have graphically shown, the 1.5-metre rule tends to go out the window in such situations.
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Now, with a cluster emerging at Casula in Sydney's Liverpool area, there's a growing possibility that the increase in Australian case numbers will continue to accelerate.
If so, the relative calm that existed in this country from late April to late June will give way to further rounds of the draconian but medically effective broad-scale lockdowns everyone had hoped we could somehow avoid.
The accompanying case curves show that Australia is not the only nation to see its COVID-19 numbers rise rapidly after an initial spike was arrested, or at least brought down from its initial heights.
Plenty of countries have not even managed that.
News from each of these nations shows they are experiencing the same sort of tension between virus control and economic activity that is the major issue here.
In Japan, a government push to reopen for tourism is being criticised by residents who do not want coronavirus brought from Tokyo, where daily case numbers are hitting the same sorts of numbers coming out of Victoria.
In Iran, with almost 260,000 cases and more than 12,800 deaths, the government knows that closing businesses would help bring its epidemic under control but says it can't afford to further damage an economy already crippled by US nuclear sanctions on oil sales and other industries.
In Israel, where the jobless rate has topped 20 per cent and the second peak has eclipsed the first, thousands of people turned out in Tel Aviv on Saturday to protest against the government's handling of the crisis.
As with Australia's Black Lives Matter rallies, the protest went ahead despite concerns it would add to the tally of cases, which in Israel were already building at 1000 a day.
Globally, the case rate has accelerated past 200,000 new infections a day, meaning we could easily reach 14 million, and see the death toll hit 600,000, before next week.
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