The three-day Darwin lockdown (four days for Katherine) no doubt helped stop the spread of the virus and the government has maintained its reputation as being best-in-class when it comes to managing the pandemic.

But the measures that were taken to combat a potential outbreak can’t be maintained forever.

Shutting down entire cities and towns every time there is a single case of Covid-19 is not a sustainable long-term policy.

Nor can we continue to shut our borders every time there is a coronavirus outbreak interstate.

As Tourism NT chair Michael Bridge revealed last week, that brief shutdown cost the industry $12m.

But that’s just a fraction of the damage that has been done to the Territory’s tourism business because of this pandemic.

Operators in Central Australia have been the hardest hit. Already cut off from the lucrative international tourism market, they’ve now been shut off from their two biggest domestic markets – Sydney and Melbourne – because of hotspot declarations.

Local initiatives such as tourism vouchers can only make up a fraction of what is being lost, and they come at the cost of increasing the government’s growing debt.

If the situation continues for too much longer, by the time our borders reopen there might be no tourism industry left.

It’s not just business being punished by constant lockdowns and border closures.

This week a woman told Mix FM her harrowing story of being stuck in mandatory quarantine in Alice Springs.

She’d travelled home to the Territory from Melbourne where she’d been having medical treatment in the hope she could see her dying mother one last time before she passed away.

The woman was fully vaccinated and had returned several negative Covid tests but was still not permitted to leave quarantine.

She’d asked for one final solitary hour with her mother, but her request was denied.

The pain caused by that decision will no doubt last with her the rest of her life.

This situation is not sustainable.

The Territory, like the rest of the nation, needs a concrete plan for reopening.

When the pandemic began, most people would have believed we’d be past the worst of it by now, especially if we’d developed an effective vaccine.

But more than 18 months on our lives are still in limbo.

Businesses don’t know if they’ll be open or shut from one week to the next, tourism operators can’t tell if they’ll be booked out or empty, and people can’t visit dying loved ones.

This is despite several effective vaccines being developed.

At the beginning of the pandemic our brightest medical minds told us of the measures we would need to take to suppress the virus.

The goal was to control numbers so our hospital system would not become overwhelmed.

But that strategy has been replaced with the utopian goal of eradication.

We’ve managed to largely achieve that in the Territory for now, but it will be near-on impossible in the future, unless we plan to permanently close our borders.

That might be an option for Western Australia – as a jurisdiction that receives about 50 cents in GST revenue for every dollar it puts in, it’s in a position of strength when it comes to bargaining on this issue.

The Territory can’t exist in the long-term on a policy of closing its border to New South Wales and Victoria when our very existence – including the funding of home improvement schemes and local tourism vouchers – relies on revenue from those states.

This week the Doherty Institute released modelling to support a potential reopening when vaccination rates reach between 70 and 80 per cent.

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It notes the importance of learning to live with the virus, rather than trying to eradicate it.

The institute notes the importance of improving public health measures so we can achieve this goal with minimum impact.

But it also provides some important context in a country that has become obsessed with reporting daily case numbers and deaths.

“In an average year of influenza, we would roughly have 600 deaths and 200,000 cases in Australia,” the institute says.

“Any death is a tragedy, but our health system can cope with this. In the Covid-19 modelling, opening up at 70 per cent vaccine coverage of the adult population with partial public health measures, we predict 385,983 symptomatic cases and 1457 deaths over six months. With optimal public health measures (and no lockdowns) this can be significantly reduced to 2737 infections and 13 deaths.”

The institute says there is light at the end of the tunnel.

“Covid-19 won’t go away but it will be easier to control in the future,” it says.

We need a solid plan for that future now.