A lot’s changed in the past year. Photo: Michelle Kroll.
This time last year, I returned to Australia after eight years away. I was a passenger on one of the first planes allowed to land in the country after stultifying quarantine restrictions were finally lifted.
Despite screaming and shouting from the rest of the country, NSW decided enough was enough and it was time to join most of the rest of the world in opening its borders and allowing some form of normality to return to people’s lives after two years of the COVID-19 nightmare.
The ACT, albeit reluctantly, soon followed.
Only Western Australia, which had taken its border control to a whole different level, refused to give way, still blindly following a zero-COVID policy, which most experts knew was sheer folly, before moving the goalposts on its vaccine rules.
This Christmas, I returned to WA for the first time since before the pandemic.
I travelled on a plane where most passengers were not bothering to wear masks. Airports were packed and restaurants were full – life, on the surface, was back to normal.
Except, of course, life is still not normal.
COVID still exists, people are still getting sick and even dying. For older members of the community, and those with an underlying health condition, sitting around the Christmas table with family and friends still poses a risk.
But for most Australians, life has moved on. It’s taken the best part of 12 months, but there appears to be little appetite in the broader community for conversations about the pandemic.
COVID barely makes the news anymore. There are one or two outlets that continue to do their best to remind people the pandemic is still going, and then the same people respond with concerns about the lack of mask-wearing and how the person on the bus next to them was coughing, but generally, it is yesterday’s news.
The first news story I heard when I arrived back in Australia was a report that someone on the Gold Coast had tested positive, and then the newsreader solemnly listed off places this person had visited.
As someone who had been living in London, where COVID was rampant but restrictions were few, it was quite bizarre. Roll on to the present day and Australia is now where the UK was 12 months ago.
We have been told that, eventually, we would have to learn to live with the virus. It’s not going to go away, certainly not in the short term, so best we adapt our lifestyle to deal with the likelihood we might catch it again and again.
As we head into 2023, Australia is at that stage.
Some workplaces are still insisting even close contacts should stay home. Surely this can’t continue for much longer. Sure, if your work involves regular contact with the elderly or with people with serious health issues, you should stay home.
But many employers are now happy for their employees to come to work even if they have COVID, as long as they feel up to it. The fact is that some people catch COVID and don’t even realise it. I barely knew I had it when I first caught it in January 2021.
So welcome to 2023. Many will not like it, but this is the new norm. We are living with COVID.
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