living with COVID

August was the month when NSW abandoned COVID-zero and aimed at ‘living with COVID’.  Sometimes this was more specifically living with Delta, partly because the politicians wanted to remind us that Delta was different and required a different response from  the response to previous variants of COVID. The best we could do with Delta was keep the numbers of infections down until such time as the community was close to being fully vaccinated.  The first step for living with COVID was to achieve %70 to %80 vaccination rates. After that there would be a gradual easing of restrictions, although some things could remain a permanent part of our lives, such as mask wearing in public and social distancing.

 Living with COVID means that we can expect rates of infection to surge but hospitalisations and deaths to stay low.  So one effect of the changed strategy is that the public was encouraged to pay no attention to the rising case numbers because it is inevitable and, in a sense, not important that more people will test positive in the coming months.  What matters is how many people need to go to hospital and how many people die.  The numbers we need to keep our eye on are the numbers of vaccinations.