I live in a place that has been held up (together with New Zealand) as the shining light of effective infection control.
About four weeks ago, a driver who ferried three or four air crew from the airport to their quarantine hotel ended up getting infected by one of the air crew. The driver was not vaccinated (yes, really), nor was there any requirement for him to be vaccinated (yes, really, really).
Now, about a month later, about one half of Australia's population is under lock-down because one person was all it took to spread the virus into the community. It does not help that the delta variant is far more infectious than any of the variants that preceded it. People have managed to infect someone else within 36 hours of getting infected themselves. That doesn't leave our contact tracers much of a chance
Moreover, as of now, about 13% of the Australian population has had two doses of a vaccine. Yes, you read that right: 13%. And about one third of the population has had one shot. Never mind that that many other first-world countries can boast of vaccination rates of 50% and more.
Also, anyone aged below 40 years is currently ineligible to get the (Astra Zeneca) vaccine, unless that person opts against the advice of our vaccine advisory body and chooses to take the vaccine "with informed consent," regardless. What that means is that the person takes a (very small) risk of ending up with a potentially serious blood clotting problem. (Never mind that the risk of dying from Covid is many times higher than the risk of getting a blood clot from the Astra Zeneca vaccine.) But, basically, if you are under forty here, you are screwed.
The Pfizer vaccine (the only other vaccine in Australia) is in extremely short supply. Someone below 40 years of age has essentially zero chance of getting that vaccine right now, unless they camp outside a vaccination centre and get lucky to receive one of the left-over doses at the end of the day because there were a few no-shows.
In short, as spectacularly good as Australia's response has been in controlling the spread of the disease, as shockingly poor has been the vaccination effort.
And now we have delta on the loose. New South Wales, Victoria, and South Australia are under strict lock-down. That works out to well over half the country's population.Today, we had yet more infections spring up in Queensland, so we may be next in line.
This time, I'm afraid that the virus may well have got the better of us. We had too many close shaves already. With more than 90% of the Australian population being near-enough defenseless (with either no dose or a single dose), this may turn out to be very serious indeed.
I do hope that I'm wrong.