Blog Day 656 - Tuesday 25 January 2022 - Day 87 of Covid Nearly Normal

 Guess what, today is the second anniversary of the arrival of the Covid virus into Australia.  How naïve were we, thinking this would all be over in three months or possibly six months at the worst.

Although 25th January 2020 was the first time we acknowledged the existence of the virus in Australia it was already in its 78th day worldwide and was just lurking ready to land here and cause us some grief.  

And here we are two years later and we are still wearing masks, still limited in travel, discussing whether kids should be back at school or not, recording new daily infections in the thousands and daily deaths in the tens.  We all thought we would get a vaccine shot and all would be well, and here we are again with a lot of us now having received three vaccine injections and contemplating whether we will need to get a fourth.

I can recall that it wasn't until sometime in March 2020 that we all started to take this virus thing a bit seriously.  The Grand Prix in Melbourne was cancelled the weekend of 15 March and was going to be rescheduled for later in the year, well that didn't happen and neither did Melbourne's 2021 Grand Prix.

I was supposed to go away camping the weekend of 20 March 2020 and I cancelled due to concerns about the virus and the possibility of travel restrictions being imposed, we hadn't gone into lockdown at that stage.

On 25 March 2020 Victoria went into Stage 2 restrictions and on 30 March we went into a full blown Stage 3 lockdown, to be followed by many more.

I started this blog on 24 March 2020 and it has been running now for 656 days, although not every day of that period.  I just had a look at some of the very early entries, my what fun I was having.  Who can forget my regular feature "what's in the pantry Graeme", or my crazy hairbrain schemes for producing a covid vaccine from battery acid and other common household goods, using ferrets as guinea ferrets (until they escaped and cleaned up the local stray cat population), what about my rent a dog scheme using homeless dogs from the RSPCA and my pat a dog scheme using unrented homeless dogs.  As usual genius is not recognised until it is too late.

In the last two years there has been 2,285,286 reported cases of the virus nationally and 60,273,666 tests conducted.  (I think that this testing figure might be understated as for a period of time only the testing conducted by the state run centres was being reported, in Victoria at least). There has been 48,055,260 doses of the vaccine administered Australia wide for a national vaccination rate of 92%, double vaccinated.  (No figures for % triple vaxxed as yet although 6.5 million booster shots have been administered).

Whatever anybody says this has been a magnificent effort of logistics, planning and implementation.  Accepted that there have been mistakes made along the way, many of which I have reported on in this blog, but I think we have to also recognise a job well done and give credit where credit is due.

Despite the best efforts of all concerned Australia wide we have still recorded 3,225 virus related deaths for the pandemic to date. Nationally we are still reporting between 50 and 70 or so deaths per day.  At 124 deaths per million of population this is still a remarkable result compared to many the death rates in many other comparable countries.

I do remember when I was first recording the pandemic figures, they rarely added up, agreed or balanced and as an accountant that offended my sense of order, I have nearly got over that.

I might leave it at that today, it is 34 degrees outdoors and humid and the aircon is battling a bit so I might allow myself to have an early drink, to prevent dehydration of course.

Update on the local figures over the next or two.

Let us all hope that I am not still reporting these numbers this time next year.