VICTORIA'S spike of coronavirus cases has led the state to reimpose some COVID-19 restrictions and to defer others, at a time when the push to reopen state boundaries for trade and travel has become a national clamour.
Despite increasing rates of new cases during June, Australia's already remarkable escape from the worst of the pandemic shows in its continued slide down the global scale, to 70th position.
Worldwide, the pace of infection continues to increase, with another daily record of 176,000 new cases recorded twice last week on the Johns Hopkins University dashboard.
CORONAVIRUS INTERNATIONALLY
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Spain lifts lockdown after 14 weeks
- Brazil cases top one million
- Germany's 770 new cases in a day highest for a month
- WHO warns that pandemic accelerating
- Study finds virus was in Italian sewerage in December 2019
Without a vaccine or a miraculous natural weakening of the virus, COVID-19 will surely continue to take its terrible toll.
World-wide case numbers will pass nine million early this week.
The number of deaths, almost 465,000, is destined to pass half a million before the end of next week.
But the health impacts - and the broader economic and employment costs from the shuttering of trade - are not the only negatives.
The longer that borders are closed, the greater the potential for international mistrust.
We have referred more than once in this space to Prime Minister Scott Morrison's March 30 prediction that COVID-19 could see "countries themselves fall into chaos".
We doubt Mr Morrison had the United States in mind, but US President Donald Trump's many controversies have only increased since coronavirus.
His comment to a Saturday night campaign rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma - that he ordered a slowdown in COVID-19 testing to keep case numbers down - reveals a manipulation of coronavirus data while he accuses others, especially China and the World Health Organisation, of doing the same.
Meanwhile, America burns as the Black Lives Matter protests continue.
We observed the day after Mr Morrison's "nations in chaos" comment that conflict between nations was the ultimate, if unspoken, step in his dire list of possibilities.
His explosive announcement on Friday, that a "state-based cyber actor" was targeting Australia's governments and major commercial enterprises was quickly denounced by China.
Two days earlier, veteran Australian investigative journalist Brian Toohey had warned that being prodded by the US into "full-scale economic warfare against China could easily morph into a full-scale hot war".
Wherever we are now, it's a long way from John Howard's "alert but not alarmed".
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