Living with Covid: The rest of our lives starts now

Police at the Queensland-New South Wales border checkpoint in October. Picture: NCA NewsWire / Dan Peled

Well, the rest of all our lives starts around now.

Over the last couple of months we’ve taken a series of – cautious and hesitant – baby steps out of the last two years; now we are about to take the big steps into the future of ‘living with’ the virus and the vaccines.

If that is to mean anything, it must mean really opening the borders.

It must mean opening the international border to, literally, millions of people each year, some of whom will inevitably arrive with a ‘passenger’ hitching a ride in their respiratory tracts.

It must mean the states really opening their borders as well, not just to their fellow Aussies but those millions of international visitors.

Forgive me, if I don’t rate what Queensland has just done as ‘opening its border’; not with all the rules and process still around entry.

And what happens if visitors start testing positive three days in?

‘Really opening’, also means eliminating any and all threat of slamming them shut.

The same applies to lockdowns and all the rest.

The threat that any of that could come back, is only slightly less damaging than them actually being back.

Police work at a checkpoint at the Queensland and NSW border in September. Picture: NCA NewsWire / Jono Searle

The threat is not really ‘living with the virus and the vaccines’.

It’s certainly not remotely like a return to a February 2020 future. Indeed, can we ever?

This is not to pre-criticise any of that potentially happening; simply to state the reality.

It’s far too soon to assume exactly what future we have embarked on.

Then there’s the legacy of the last two years, which is going to continue to weigh on us all the way through at least the 2020s.

We are going to get one sobering example with the mid-year (federal) budget update at the end of the week.

Yes, the numbers are going to look much better than they did in the last full budget in May.

But aside from the fact – that always applies –that they are still only, and usually over-optimistic, predictions; let’s see what actually happens, as the years unfold, or unravel.

Aside from that, they will still show budget deficits into the never-never and the debt still heading for the trillion, and counting.

And that’s only Canberra. Add on the states, with the worst of them, Victoria.

Even on the most optimistic assumption of how ‘living with the virus and the vaccines’ turns out, we face some serious challenges – across the economy, across the health care system, across individual health situations, mental health, childhood development, and on and on and on.

This is all in addition to the ‘normal’ challenges that we would be getting on a regular, permanent basis anyway, from politics and money, across things like healthcare and education, infrastructure, etc etc, and out into the big bad world.

The ‘big one’ is of course China. Two years ago we did have ‘issues’ with China, but back then it was still essentially our economic fairy godmother and the Chinese economy itself seemed to be purring along quite well.

Now the issues have become serious problems; it’s been trying every which way – except for WA’s iron ore which it can’t do without – to not be a fairy godmother; and the great Chinese economy is going through some sort of implosion.

Further the ‘free’ money – zero interest rates and massive money-printing by the world’s major central banks – since the GFC in 2008, and on which they doubled down on in 2020 when Covid erupted – is reaching its potential cataclysmic end-point.

The trigger is the surging US inflation.

The bottom line is that 2022 is going to prove an ‘interesting’ year whatever which way things develop.

Possibly the single best thing we’ve got going for us right now is actually Omicron.