*…it was the people who for what ever reason could not comply with simple infection control measures, because their non compliance extended the periods of lock down that was being used to contain the spread of this virus…*

Who they are by the evidence at the time, were the poorer classes from the Western Suburbs of Sydney as major example.

While the “wealthy and worthy” group from the Eastern suburbs, partied on Bondi beach, the wretched, diseased and abandoned workers from them West, were treated to an authoritarian dystopian night mare of Police heavy handedness, which resulted in outrages such as forced entries into homes, ignoring protests of the residents as standard procedure.

Police road blocks separating adjoining suburbs, enforced with rudeness and heavy fines.

Evictions of people unable to pay rents, and treated without mercy, thrown onto the street to live in tents, as standard procedure.

Meanwhile the wealthy took their money and jobs into regional areas, creating a huge escalation in real estate values and a corresponding affordable housing crisis for the poorer classes. Then the floods. Evidence of climate change say the same wealthy as they vote in the Greens and Labor, as a hedge against their pathetic life styles of exclusion.

No doubt this will result in more pain as additional pressure on the poor, with already unaffordable power bills, added to by the dismantling of affordable coal generation.

The wealthy will hedge themselves against the pain with taxpayer subsidies on banks of solar panels, feeding excess power back into a grid to be resold at a huge mark-up, to the unworthy, unclean and diseased renter classes, unable to participate in the exclusionary scam for votes. What is the value of a vote?

As we’ve seen with The Gillard era, an attack on unworthy vehicles of the poor will soon appear. Unclean vehicles driven by the unclean: How justified!

Meanwhile, the party rages in the East, where obviously this whining author stakes his self assured future. Oh how the gap widens!

Dan.

In another month or so, the next flu season will shake society even more than the last one.
The only difference then will be more people dying because the money & will to help have run out !
I hope the anti-vaxxers will feel good about that !

They don't want us to get back to normal. They loved the power of Covid. Now that that has lost some of its fear, they are kicking off with 'the worst 'flu ever'; get everyone over 6 months old vaccinated!

Australians, weakened and cowered by the totalitarianism of the Covid period, are now suckers for any fear campaign, punched out daily by the media, on behalf of shadowy, unelected bureaucrats and Big Pharma's insatiable appetite for money.

The thing that spreads "like wildfire" is fear: the fear of a servile, dependent public. Fear is the key to control.

That our dictators, elected and non-elected, saved 40,000 lives with their fear-mongering and crushing of freedoms is absolute BS.

Absolute BS is what the political class runs on these days, and most of us are too stupid to reconise it

Normal? The only path to normal lies in eradicating covid! And do able if we deploy both vaccines and antivirals the best of the latter destroying 99.99% of conavirus Supplemented with a vaccinated passport.

And those without one denied access to any public facility, drivers licence, trade certificate, diploma or degree. And even quarantined on an offshore Island.

This virus does mutate and like the spanish flu can mutate to a far more virulent and contagious variant.

Now, I couldn't give a rats if that then wipes out 99.99% of the unvaccinated.

What I won't forgive, is those innocent lives they take with them as the super spreaders they will be.

Moreover, the new and more deadly variants are developed solely in the unvaccinated. And makes them no better than a demented killer going bananas with an assault rifle. Only more so given the potenial fatalities could be in the millions. As we saw from the spanish flu or covid, the latter taking more live than two world wars.

Without eradicating this virus with compulsory health orders, one day a new and vastly more deadly variant will like the spanish flu, start killing our kids and healthy young adults. When that day comes our hospitals and health systems will collapse and go into meltdown!
Alan B.

While homo sapiens was very fortunate to have, somehow, evolved on this planet it is still, and always was, a hostile place.
Live with it and enjoy and stop whinging.

Hey ttbn,

"That our dictators, elected and non-elected, saved 40,000 lives with their fear-mongering and crushing of freedoms is absolute BS."

They got thousands of people killed by failing to quarantine the nation from a foreign contagion, that's how I see it.

I tend to agree with you both ttbn, Armchair Critic.

This is my understanding of the essential positions-

ttbn's position- Corona isn't as dangerous as "some" are saying- and it was an over-reaction to have lockdowns. Corona is basically the same as the flu.

Armchair Critic's position- If Corona was as dangerous as "some" are saying they should have locked the national borders better- from nations with different sovereign policies on medicine- that way we wouldn't have had to have lockdowns between states and within states and the economy and the logistics and the workplaces wouldn't have had to be locked down- and millions of people wouldn't have lost their jobs (I see this as mainly the fault of the state governents- mostly Victoria).

The Corona strategy would have been convenient for Communist insurgents- it acts against their enemies in business and the workplace financially, it gets the public used to complying with intrusive authority, it sets up the authoritarian hierarchy (you can't get food or medical treatment, etc unless you comply with Corona authoritarianism), it tracks the movement of individual people.

Science should be a tool of advise not tyranny- but we need to question the science- the questioning of science is part of science. We need to see the evidence and it needs to be peer and publicly reviewed.

Similar to the Economic- Efficient Market Hypothesis. Sadly democracy especially Representative Democracy isn't democratic- and science isn't always science- it's an indication of our corruption if we've forgotten this.

Well, the next sad episode is only around the corner, let's see how Albo & Co will handle it. Lots of hindsight available to them !

Phillip started his article with a direct quote from my publication in Online Opinion, entitled “Lies, damned lies and COVID-19 death statistics”. I am glad that my work stimulated him to write about “getting back to normal”.
Although the references to leprosy, tuberculosis, typhoid, and cholera may be historically interesting, these curable illnesses are not relevant to the current Coronavirus pandemic.
It is very interesting that Influenza has been less prevalent in 2020 and 2021, but this is probably due to a "dominant respiratory virus" effect, rather than non-pharmaceutical interventions. Now that the incidence of Coronavirus is decreasing, the incidence of Influenza has risen again, as expected. Coronavirus has been circulating for centuries and will continue to do so, in various forms. We need to establish sensible, practical protocols for dealing with Coronavirus, without penalizing young, healthy working people who are at low risk of adverse outcomes from this virus.
Modelling extreme, adverse consequences during the Coronavirus pandemic has created unnecessary fear in Governments and in the community and has been proven to be wrong on innumerable occasions.
Dedicated nurses, doctors and paramedical staff working in large hospitals have been subjected to various stresses for many years before the current Coronavirus pandemic, including long hours, night shifts, complicated bureaucratic processes, bullying, regimentation, emotional stress and burn-out. I agree with Phillip that the Coronavirus pandemic has added to their stresses because of increased workloads. However, staff shortages caused by Government rules requiring compulsory isolation or quarantine of close contacts of COVID positive cases have also contributed to staff shortages and increased stress for hospital staff.
Around the world, people are slowly “coming back to normal” after two years of living in fear which has been promulgated and encouraged by our “popular” press. We have been subjected to authoritarian, confusing Government regulations which have limited our basic freedoms. Australia is lagging behind the rest of the world in “returning to normal”. I hope and pray that the people of Australia can return to a sensible, safe “normal” as soon as possible.