Can anyone remember the two years leading up to March this year, when people tuned into daily press conferences in Perth with baited breath to hear if we had even a single case of COVID?
And when there was a case, there was a mad panic as we were warned where that poor unsuspecting soul had visited in previous days – where they shopped or bought petrol – and be told to isolate if we had crossed paths.
New case numbers are now routinely hovering around 5000 a day and there are no big announcements any more.
But even if it now seems ludicrous that a city with a population of more than 2 million was thrown into lockdown because of a couple of cases, context is important and many experts argue we were right to be hyper-vigilant at the time.
Hindsight is a wonderful thing. Our State has come through in relatively good shape, so it is pretty tempting to say it was all overkill, but what if things had gone really pear-shaped?
Unlike most jurisdictions around the world where COVID hit like a slow tsunami and authorities scrambled to vaccinate populations that were sitting ducks, we went from zero to full throttle in a highly vaccinated population.
Hindsight is a wonderful thing. Our State has come through in relatively good shape, so it is pretty tempting to say it was all overkill, but what if things had gone really pear-shaped?
The COVID experience in WA will no doubt form the subject of international studies.
Now we’re getting on with life, albeit with a close eye on those pesky COVID variants, and that’s a good thing. We are the lucky State, but it didn’t happen by chance.