NSW has new leaders days out from COVID 'reopening'

Yesterday's COVID briefing, pushing the vaccination message.

WITH 594 locally acquired cases of COVID-19 announced yesterday, the overall NSW numbers - driven heavily by Sydney - are in noticeable decline.

This is surely what the state's health experts had hoped for, as we head towards Monday's great reopening, arguably the most important day of the year so far.

Unfortunately, however, the picture in the Hunter Region looks increasingly discomforting, with 93 cases announced yesterday in the Hunter New England Local Health District - 92 of them in the Hunter.

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Statewide, case numbers have dropped to where they were in mid-August, 60 per cent down on the September peaks beyond 1500 cases a day.

Here, however, the Hunter's daily case totals are rising most days. Yesterday's total of 93, another record, was more than 15 per cent of the statewide total.

Few are predicting the Hunter spread will stop any time soon.

More generally, we have been told to expect big increases in COVID case numbers once the gates are open.

But the nearer we come to a relative free-for-all, the more concerns raised by health experts, and by frontline health workers whose job it will be to hold things together if cases start to pile up dramatically.

WAVE FORM: The Johns Hopkins University dashboard last night. 235.9 million cases, 4.8 million deaths, 6.35 billion vaccination doses. Incident rates per head of population topped by small countries and headed by the Seychelles at 21,920 per 100,000, or just over 20 per cent of the population infected. In the USA, the infection rate has topped 13 per cent of the population. Source: Johns Hopkins University

Case numbers, admittedly, are not the only measure of the pandemic.

The ultimate legacy is the number of people the virus kills or makes ill.

The highly publicised rates of vaccine efficacy - AstraZeneca's 67-per-cent rate against Delta, for example - warned us from early on that vaccines would not provide complete protection.

The good thing, though, is that when the virus evades the vaccine, the results are generally less severe.

This has given various governments the confidence to start dismantling the various protective measures that have dominated life, globally, for almost two years.

COVID GLOBALLY:

• Delta lingering in NZ, death toll 28
• New daily highs in Singapore, Romania
  
• Worldwide latest
  

Most, if not all, experts expect the COVID burden to rise significantly after NSW starts lifting restrictions from next week.

The pressure on the government to "get it right" will be enormous.

Yet the bulk of the responsibility will fall on a new leadership team in Premier Dominic Perrottet and deputy Liberal leader Stuart Ayres - elected on Tuesday - and Deputy Premier Paul Toole and deputy Nationals leader Bronnie Taylor, elected yesterday.

Rarely, outside of war, has a new leadership team had so much to confront, and so quickly.

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New National Party deputy leader Bronnie Taylor. Picture: Sylvia Liber