Sajid Javid’s deleted weekend tweet about Britain ‘learning to live with, rather than cower from Covid’ upset just about everyone – from frontline NHS workers to Covid-19 victims’ groups.
But Javid could actually have been talking about Australians. While the UK’s Freedom Day went ahead despite 40,000 people testing positive for Covid daily, over half of Australia’s population has been cowering under lockdowns imposed by their state governments, while the other half are exhorted to treat their locked down fellow Australians as pariahs.
For what?
Yesterday, Australia’s health department reported just 157 positive cases in the previous 24 hours, mostly in the Greater Sydney area. There were less than 2,500 active cases nationally out of a population of 25 million, with less than 200 in hospital, let alone intensive care.
Yet for weeks, Sydney and Melbourne have been locked down – Melbourne’s is being eased today – and Adelaide was shut down by the South Australian government for a week for just a handful of community-transmitted infections.
Our federal and state governments are obsessed with eliminating Covid, and now even one positive case is one too many
Australia, like New Zealand, used our geography to shut Covid out.
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