In the first two years of the pandemic, Australia’s COVID elimination strategy was among the most effective in the world. Now we rank second in the world for the most cases per capita.
While COVID has become less deadly, it has disproportionately claimed the lives of older and poorer Australians. Others have missed out on necessary preventative care during the pandemic.
Prime Minister Scott Morrison says every COVID death is a terrible loss but Australians want to move on. Here’s how ethics can shape our response to this stage of the pandemic.
The human brain isn’t built to understand large numbers.
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The brain can count small numbers or compare large ones. But it struggles to understand the value of a single large number. This fact may be influencing how people react to numbers about the pandemic.
Vaccination has allowed people to be more social again with much less risk of serious illness, but less cautious behaviors put people at an increased risk of catching the virus.
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Lisa Miller, University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus
Calculating your risk of death or hospitalization if you are infected with the coronavirus requires good data – notably, the total number of infections in the US. Unfortunately, that data is fuzzy.
Despite improvements, the aged care sector is currently under extreme pressure. The serious effects of isolation and neglect are potentially as severe now and more widespread than in 2020.
Photos of Peruvian doctors who died of COVID, posted outside of the medical college in Lima, Peru.
Paolo Aguilar/EPA-EFE
The country moved quickly to contain the virus, but its health system struggled to look after those who got sick.
Clinical trials demonstrate how effective vaccines are individually, but the real world shows how effective they are at a population level.
AP Photo/Mark Lennihan, Pool
Delta is more contagious and appears to be more deadly. And it’s more likely to land those infected in hospital and intensive care. Here’s what the latest evidence says about the dominant variant.
This inquiry must meet high public expectations, demonstrate independence and provide answers to many technical and policy questions – all made more difficult because of past inquiry failures.
Rapid response: testing 11 million people in Wuhan, China.
EPA-EFE/Shepherd Zhou
COVID-19 cases in Indonesia are rising and are expected to keep doing so for another two weeks until the effects of restrictions and mask mandates are seen.
The research was conducted at the Zambia University Teaching Hospital morgue.
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Honorary Professor Faculty of Health and Medical Science, Univeristy of Sydney; Senior Researcher Sydney Institue for Infectious Disease, University of Sydney., University of Sydney