My impression is that after 2ish years of fairly strict covid control measures most people are "over" covid, even if covid isn't over them. Maybe like a rebound effect.Understood, just specifically asking about situation in Oz. We are not seeing same in California so far even though cases are going up significantly. I am curious if this is due to Australia being spared earlier on due to stricter lock downs and general abidance by the rules or just us lagging. As we've all found out, vaccines are not very good at preventing infection with omicron and variants.
The semi - explicit contract was kinda like "help us control the virus until everyone is vaccinated, then everything will be OK" and this was broadly accepted. Now people expect everything to be OK. So there is absolutely zero political will to reinstitute control measures, even relatively mild ones like masks in crowded indoor settings.
Few wear masks or avoid high risk transmission situations, so transmission is out of control here. For example, I know multiple people who have caught covid at (separate) weddings in the last couple of weeks. As mentioned, our high vax rates are great at preventing severe disease in most people but not so good at reducing transmission. So we have the highest (or second highest?) transmission rate in the world (although our testing is probably more comprehensive than some places, so this may be exaggerated). Nonetheless, our death rates are very low by world standards even though most of the population has had covid (many have had it multiple times).
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