Living with Omicron

In the past week, over 700,000 Australians infected with Omicron. We learned a lot about how confused it could be to live with Omicron.

Yes, Omicron is a Covid-19 variant but it is a very different variant. We need to adjust our understanding of how to live with Omicron from our previous understanding of Covid-19.

At first, those infected were required to get PCR tests from government clinics to confirm that they really caught the Covid-19 virus. This meant that they needed to queue up many hours for testing and many of them were finally being turned away when all the tests have gone. They needed to isolate and wait days for the test results to be available. For most of them, the symptoms had long gone before they had the results.

For those who did not want to queue up, they needed to rush for a RAT kit which would cost them more than 40 dollars each. Many failed to find one in pharmacies or supermarkets after going one after another. As a result, they had no choice but treated themselves as infected. Many then had the symptoms for one or two days and got better after. They still would isolate and inform their friends who they had met before.

Clearly, our society is now in great confusion as the government released figures that were scaring but most people who were infected told another story. The government asked hundreds of thousands of people to follow a 7-day isolation protocol without a convenient and definite way to help these people to determine their infection status.

More than that, our hospital system is at the edge of collapsing with dedicated medical professionals under stress.

This is not the Covidnormal that we are expecting. Both the federal and state governments need to respond to this challenge.

Raymond Chow, Publisher