Now there were words I have not seen in any newspaper anywhere, possibly ever. Yet there they are in today’s Oz in Adam Creighton’s column: I caught Covid and it was no big deal – providing a perspective equally rare in this day and age. Here’s the full sentence:
Former US president Donald Trump was right last July when he pointed out that encouraging people to be tested when they weren’t especially sick was a waste, inflating the perceived risk of catching the virus, not to mention the financial cost and the disruption to the lives of close contacts.
The article goes on to point out just how astonishingly wasteful this expenditure has been.
The US has conducted more than 620 million tests since the pandemic began, even more per capita than test-obsessed Australia. At a cost of a few hundred dollars each, when the whole chain of Covid ticket clipping has been tallied, that’s more than $US100bn spent on testing in the US alone.
$US100bn!!! And as pointed out, the PRN test has massive numbers of false positives. But as he also points out, the true positives are almost nothing to worry about either.
The virus is already rampant in the US, as it is practically everywhere else. Does it matter if someone flying to the US has Covid when practically half the country already has had it? In short, got Covid, who cares.
Ran into a friend on the street just yesterday who almost first up told me he had been vaxxinated and will get the booster in January. After all, he said, I don’t want to die. I suppose not, but who wants to live in such morbid fear either? I will conclude with this from Adam’s column, which is my own conclusion as well.
It has been 21 months of rolling restrictions in what can be described only as the greatest, and arguably one of the most destructive, obsessions in world history given the economic and social chaos governments have caused. We urgently need to move on.
“Urgently” is putting it mildly.
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