What We Need To Know About The Latest COVID Wave

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An eighth Covid wave is gripping the country, coming in right before Christmas… again!

Thousands of people are still getting sick, with this strain being one of the nastier ones, but there’s one thing a bit different now: it seems we’re not as terrified as we once were.

Listen to today’s episode of The Briefing here:

Now we’re all vaccinated though, how concerned should we be? Should we consider getting a booster and masking up again?

In this episode of The Briefing Antoinette Lattouf is joined by professor Paul Griffin from the University of Queensland to ask all the big questions.

Professor Griffin said while Australians are becoming complacent, accepting COVID is just a part of our lives now, we should still be taking the necessary precautions.

“I think the challenge is being, we maybe overdid it for a period of time early and that did lead to some fatigue and saturation,” he said.

“Some people turned off from some of that messaging and then I think we’ve underdone it in more recent times. We’ve stopped reporting numbers, we’ve stopped giving some of those basics of the public health messaging and some education around how we can intervene.

“I think it’s about getting the right messaging to the right people, and I think that has to be a really active process of letting people know COVID hasn’t gone away.

“It’s increased in terms of risk at the moment, but we have fantastic tools to address it”.

Tricia Mifsud