Pass the bottle, pass the drugs and shoot me up now. Danger lies ahead!

Dear fellow Boomers, what a mess!

An eternal optimist was I. A worry wart I have become! The 2021 celebratory champagne is back in the proverbial cellar. The heavily malted whiskey has assumed pride of place next to the organic chicken for dinner, the salad lunch and the breakfast cereal not to mention next to the loo roll and the coffee grinder. How has it all gone so wrong? Is our success in keeping Covid-19 at bay about to take a turn for the worse?

Remember 2020?

It is impossible not to, you say. We all deserved a stiff drink or two in reward for simply surviving the year. That was the year we were able to keep the dreaded Covid-19 at bay by sealing our borders, by prohibiting most punters from travelling overseas and by imposing restrictions on said punters rights to free movement and assembly. That was the public health advice and most of us, including this complacent Boomer, accepted it. We could not see other options and the idea of a magic fix in the form of a vaccine seemed but a distant fantasy. Here we are almost 15 months later and the biggest vaccination campaign in history is underway with more than 1.25 billion doses having been administered across 174 countries.

How wonderful for them we say, yet we are still living like it is 2020!

From champion bug slayer to sitting duck.

Part of my dread is that we have gone from being a world champion in bug slaying, to a country more at risk of Covid-19 than ever.

This year was going to be different - 2021 was meant to be our year! We were promised our drugs in the form of vaccines and the joy of being shot up by this October. The promise was that by now, the aged and those with a serious disability would be fully vaccinated. And with that ring of protection in place, borders would be opened as safely as it was possible to do so. But this opportunity has been botched and the vaccination rollout remains wanting, despite having just passed the 3 million mark.

But here we are almost at the mid-point in the year with June and Queen’s birthday (possibly her last) less than a month away, and those crunching the vaccination data tell us that we can expect to reach the 40 million doses needed to fully vaccinate Australia’s adult population by late 2022. And while only the most pessimist among us believe that it will take this long to get the job done, the Federal Government is now saying that the borders will not be open until at least mid-2022, which probably means that the vaccination rollout will take at least this long.

In other words, the strategies we used in 2020 to defeat the virus will be reused in 2021 given the shoddy rollout of the vaccination programme. My pessimism lies in the Government’s assumption that we will be equally supportive and compliant once again, despite the evidence suggesting otherwise.

The good news is that 2001 is the year the punters are finding their voices. Bravery is again becoming widespread. There are louder and more persistent calls for more open borders, the right to travel overseas and the right to return home. These matters are before the courts and the findings will shape the national policy response to the pandemic. People of many political persuasions were equally outraged by moves to prohibit citizens and permanent residents of Indian heritage caught in a health catastrophe from returning home.

The virus will continue to bang on our door demanding entry. But the more of us that get vaccinated the louder will be the call for the borders to open. It is going to be a difficult 12 months ahead.