With Australia entering the “living with the Virus” stage, starting from this issue, BlessingCALD is now a biweekly magazine.
Even though the whole world is now worrying about the invasion of Ukraine by Russia, we all know that Covid-19 is still a threat to everyone in Australia.
On March 7, 22,268 cases were acquired in the past 24 hours and 1737 Australians are hospitalized regrettably, 5416 died since the start of the pandemic. We are not expecting Covid-19 will go away very soon but with the high vaccination rate of over 95% of vaccination of 1 dose or more for 16+ and 49.1% of booster vaccination for eligible population, Australia is confident of living with the virus without a breaking down of the medical system.
But the other parts of the world are not as good as us.
The Omicron infected cases in many Asian countries including South Korea, Vietnam, Japan, Hong Kong, Indonesia and Malaysia rocketed with the death rate in Hong Kong shocking the whole world because of its low vaccination rate among those aged over 70. Simply strict quarantine at the border will not stop the virus and only vaccination with the effective vaccine will protect, especially for aged seniors. Even though Omicron is not as severe as other variants, its speed and power of infection are alarming to the whole world.
People asked what will happen if Omicron spreads to other parts of the world with lower quality of hygiene and poorer medical support. The answer is simple. We need to vaccinate the whole world.
At the beginning of the pandemic, the Secretary-General of WHO Tedros Adhanom had warned the world that unless we vaccinated the whole world, the virus would not stop. Australia and many European countries are now starting to live with the virus, we should urgently address the issue of providing vaccines to the unvaccinated parts of the world to fight the war with Covid-19.
Act now or we shall lose our short term victory.