INTERNATIONAL comparisons show Australia's coronavirus position globally has worsened substantially, with more than 1.49 million of an overall 5.2 million cases coming in the past 28 days, the seventh highest officially reported numbers in the world during the period.
Coronavirus-related deaths have fallen since the start of the year, but weekly totals are still higher than at any time in 2020 or 2021. Even with our relatively high vaccination rates, more than 1000 people have died in Australia from, or with, COVID in the past 28 days.
Despite these figures, if there is one thing that's conspicuous by its general absence in this election campaign, it's that once-ubiquitous symbol of life since early 2020, the COVID face mask.
Government requirements vary from state to state but the latest NSW government advice is that masks are now only required for "certain high-risk settings", such as travel, hospitals and indoor music festivals, although they are still "encouraged indoors for indoor settings" where a safe distance from others cannot be maintained.
Not so long ago, a politician caught in public without a mask risked being criticised for flouting the rules they were demanding of others, but a progressive lessening in focus on the virus - and the impacts it is still having on communities across the nation - has allowed the campaign for the May 21 election to kick off with a little less attention to COVID than might have been expected.
The ostensible justification, as noted, is the putative success of the national vaccination campaign.
What began as Mr Morrison's much-criticised "strollout" has since progressed to the point where the government can say that more than 95 per cent of our over-16s are regarded as fully vaccinated.
Overall, that equates to about 83.6 per cent of the population, putting us in about 20th position, globally, in among a dozen or so nations sitting at between 80 per cent and 85 per cent vaccinated.
As has been the case since the virus emerged, the burden of illness is skewed heavily towards older people and those with compromised immune systems.
COVID HEADLINES:
- Hong Kong questions cost of restrictions
- China's worst outbreak since first Wuhan outbreak
- Greece opens for northern Summer tourism
- Britain widens access to Pfizer COVID drug
- UN urges more effort in vaccination
Dozens of Australians, most of them elderly and many in nursing homes, are dying every day.
As a range of medical experts are now acknowledging, the ease with which COVID reinfects people means that that a hoped-for "herd immunity" is unlikely.
Our leaders might be showing their full faces for the cameras, but we are not out of the woods.
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