THE reopening on Monday of hotels, clubs and bars marks another step down the road to wherever the "new normal" after coronavirus is destined to take us.
While regulars may well celebrate the ability to walk back into their local, anecdotal evidence from coffee shops and restaurants in the early days of resumed trading suggests something less than a mad rush, even with - or perhaps because of - patronage limits.
Early on, behavioural experts predicted that the longer the COVID-19 lock-downs remained in place, the more likely they were to result in changes in our daily lives after restrictions were lifted.
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The original expectation from Canberra - based on health advice - was for a shuttering of the economy until September.
Australia's success in warding off the virus allowed the lifting of restrictions from last month.
This shorter period is logically less likely to bring about permanent behavioural change, although the social distancing that must remain, even as the economy reopens, will continue to have impacts in a myriad of areas.
Australia's success can lead some to think that perhaps the risk was never there in the first place. But that is not true. We only need to look at countries as sophisticated as ours, as developed as ours, with health systems as strong as ours, who have death rates 100 times what has occurred in Australia.
Scott Morrison, Friday, May 29
As we observed here yesterday, all things political - indeed, virtually all aspects of life - are being viewed through a coronavirus lens, and will be for a long time yet.
The aphorism of the moment - "never waste a good crisis" - can be seen in the NSW government's decision to abandon its controversial Homebush stadium refurbishment.
It is also in the Morrison government's promised - or, depending on your perspective, threatened - overhaul of the industrial relations system.
Unless a major tragedy unfolds, Australia's post-COVID rebuild will be substantially easier than in countries where the virus has wreaked true havoc: a list that includes many of the world's biggest economies, China aside.
The impact may also be less extreme in such regional areas as the Hunter, which do not have the social distancing difficulties of intensely crowded capital city CBDs.
As we edge towards recovery, every sector will talk its own book: that is human nature.
But the other half of human nature is to remember that we are going through this together.
That we are all Australians, as Prime Minister Scott Morrison likes to say.
And as US President Donald Trump's call to add Australia to a post-G7 grouping should remind us, we are also part of a global fraternity of nations going through its worst collective experience since WWII.
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