The real coronavirus war is only just beginning – and we’re woefully unprepared
In early March 2020, I published an article in the Guardian, warning of the dangers of COVID-19 coming to remote communities, describing it as the ‘phoney war’ — that period of quiet before shots are fired, the “time of eerie silence when everything looks and feels as it always has, but the prescient know that mayhem looms just around the corner”.1
In the end, it took longer than many of us thought. We even had a period where we thought we might escape completely.
But the phoney war is over now, and the shooting war has well and truly begun.
If NSW’s effective reproductive rate of SARS-CoV-2 holds at around 1.3, with about 800 cases a day, we can expect to see around 5000 daily cases by the end of September, which means we’re sitting on the brink of a massive increase in critically ill patients.2
