FOR those Americans who despaired at their country's response to coronavirus under President Donald Trump, the arrival of President-elect Joe Biden must be like seeing the ambulance arrive after a long wait at an accident.
Similarly, this week's announcements about the experimental Pfizer vaccine have also given hope of a serious weapon to fight COVID-19.
The proviso, that the RNA-based vaccine needs to be frozen at minus 70 degrees Celsius - is unsurprisingly being raised as a major problem for warm weather countries, including Australia.
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Time will tell if the global "esky chain" outlined by Health Minister Greg Hunt provides the answer, or if one or more of the conventionally figured vaccines under trial come to the rescue.
In the meantime, Australia sits in an even more comfortable position, relative to most countries, than the enviable place it has occupied for most of this year.
The phrase "double doughnuts" has come to signify 10 or more consecutive days without a community infection.
Again, although credit must go to the relevant authorities - and to the Australian public for generally heeding their warnings - the real saviour of this nation has surely been its isolation, as we have pointed out before.
But long-term isolation comes with obvious costs.
And those costs can only increase as time goes on.
Vanuatu, one of the few countries to escape COVID until now, has detected its first case, in a returning traveller.
The speed with which the virus has been proven to spread means we will only remain a "doughnut" nation for as long as we keep up war-footing restrictions on international travel.
Bringing COVID under control in Australia is indeed something to be thankful for, but our economic recovery is as much tied to events overseas as it is to the minimisation or eradication of the virus here.
Cases in the US and across much of Europe are again relentlessly on the rise. India had been on track to overtake the US for the most infections, but its daily case numbers have halved under Prime Minister Mahendra Modi's lockdowns. Such harsh measures are not pleasant, we know.
But the US and India - two virus-hammered nation with almost opposite approaches - can be viewed together as a real-world case study, showing how lockdowns work.
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