Melbourne cases hit record despite two months of lockdown

The situation is not as simple as you make it out to be. There is a growing body of evidence that lockdowns and other restrictions are causing significant mental health problems, including depression and alcohol/drug abuse, increasing incidences of domestic violence, impacting the physical, intellectual, social and emotional development of children, and preventing individuals from accessing healthcare services, which will result in future deaths from undiagnosed and late-diagnosed disease.

Not taking these things into account in a cost-benefit analysis of lockdowns and other restrictions is not sensible.

> Our main failure has been in obtaining sufficient vaccine supplies, early enough, and therefore dragging all of this out far longer then necessary.

Looking at countries with much higher vaccination rates, including Israel and Singapore, the vaccines are clearly not a panacea. The virus is becoming endemic (if it isn't already), which means that at some point very soon, policies aimed at 0 COVID will need to be revisited if the countries that have embraced these policies are to ever get back to anything resembling normal.

The vaccines are effective at preventing hospitalization and death, which is a very good thing. The challenge is that, thanks apparently to Delta, breakthroughs are more common than hoped for, vaccinated people can still transmit the virus, and for the most part the people who are being hospitalized and dying with breakthrough infections are the very same people who are at greatest risk when unvaccinated -- the elderly and people with comorbidities such as obesity and diabetes.

Should we just give up on the elderly and people who have comorbidities? Of course not. But again, we also need to be realistic in our cost-benefit analyses.