With Australia’s second-biggest city under a nightly curfew and its residents reduced to figuring out whether they are “permitted” workers, it was fitting that the first week of the August reporting season provided a peek into the strange new world we live in.

Take medical device giant ResMed, a big decline in customers for its core sleep apnoea products was offset by a huge rise in the number of ventilators – more than 150,000 in the space of a few months – that were sold to hospitals as part of the global fight against a deadly global pandemic.