NSW Health's COVID-19 SNAFUs must not hold back our historic 50th country music festival

Tamworth's historic 50th country music festival will not be held in January.

It's a devastating decision, and an uncertain one.

To some it might seem a little mad to attend - or even hold - a major music festival during an outbreak of a deadly pandemic virus potentially adding tens of thousands of cases a day.

But we do essentially that every day.

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No sacrifice we can make as individuals or as a community will reduce the cost of the coming outbreak. If you're vaccinated, if you're boostered, you're as safe as you're ever going to be. Make no mistake, NSW Health and the state government has stuffed up the current outbreak - again. It really is situation normal: all fouled up.

The Christmas omicron wave took us completely by surprise - incredibly, many testing clinics were winding down for the holiday as it struck. We also don't have much of a plan to allow people or businesses to use rapid testing to manage their own risk. Only one Australian company produces rapid antigen tests for domestic use, and the federal government didn't have a plan for importing any more.

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So certainly a SNAFU, and a deadly one, but it won't be a catastrophically deadly one. In the US, President Joe Biden speaks regularly about the "pandemic of the unvaccinated". That is, hospitals and the morgue are filled up with people who didn't act to protect their own health. Australia doesn't have that many unvaccinated people, and as a result we really don't have that much pandemic either. About 689 people have died from the bug in this state so far. About half-a-dozen people are dying on an ordinary day during the Omicron outbreak, so far.

That's about 2000 deaths in a year, comparable to the 1255 people who died of flu in 2017. It's far less than the 17,500 people who die of heart disease in an ordinary year.

Which makes the simple point that coronavirus is a really, really dangerous virus - until you're vaccinated. Then it's not in the top 10 most dangerous health threats this country faces.

One day we will decide it is a virus not dangerous enough to do things like delay historic country music festivals.

For me that day was about two weeks after my second Pfizer vaccination. I live my life like it's 2019.

Everyone's tolerance for risk is different, and I'm not calling you a bad person if yours is different from mine.

But as a society we need to decide what we need to do, what threshhold we must cross, to start treating coronavirus, not as some horrifying boogey man, but like all the other illnesses that threaten us everyday, without us completely abandoning our ordinary lives.

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