If you look past the shock and awe headlines – often reality adjacent and rationality hesitant – you can find some real facts from the past and present which can tell us a lot about what might happen in the future. Here’s three that caught the eye during a week of lockdown.

So far this year, not one person has died from influenza in Australia, according to health officials. Someone might have died somewhere from complications while infected with the flu but that, apparently, doesn’t count.

According to the Commonwealth Health Department there have been no deaths from the flu this year and no one has been admitted to hospital due to influenza. The context for this is from 2019 when 250 people died. So far this year just 408 influenza cases have been reported against a rolling five year average of 53,000.

Second, there have been only two viral infections eradicated by humankind. The one that people caught and very often died from was smallpox which was officially wiped out in 1980.
The other was rinderpest, a nasty bug otherwise called cattle plague, which was voted off the planet a decade ago.

Lastly, bad cases of the common cold – the most prevalent disease on the planet – can be traced back to one of the nastier and longer lasting pandemics in medical books, the Russian Flu or the coronavirus OC43.

The Russian Flu, labeled OC43 just as we have labelled SARS-CoV-2, killed more than a million people in the late 1890s and took many years to fade through eventual herd immunity – achieved painfully without the help of vaccines. Interestingly, a common symptom of OC43 and SARS-CoV-2 is a loss of senses, particularly taste and smell.

Taking these pandemic Post It notes in order, the first tells us it hasn’t all been downside as far as our health is concerned – although globally the mortality of SARS-CoV-2 leaves the flu, well, for dead.

Most doctors and health officials reckon the big drivers of our low influenza rates this year stem from the basic hygiene we have now become used to and the closure of our borders.
Keeping our distance, washing our hands, sneezing into our elbows, giving sanitiser a regular work out, wearing masks all mean we are transmitting far less infectious stuff.

International border closures are probably a bigger factor as most deadly influenza strains fly in on planes from London, Bangkok and Athens.

An associated likely infection consequence of the last 18 months appears to be showing up in families with young children who spent most of last year at home rather than mixing with other kids with runny noses, sore throats and whatever.

This year, back at preschool or in classrooms with immune systems somewhat exposed, many young ones are picking up anything circulating in the air. They’re getting sick faster and more often and passing on colds and other viral nasties to their parents. It’s been a bad winter in many households.

This reminds us of the bleeding obvious – when it comes to viral infections, what goes around comes around.

The fact scientists around the world have only managed to eradicate two viral pandemics – one human and one affecting even-toed ungulates – tells us an inescapable truth. We are almost certainly not going to get rid of COVID-19. It will remain with us as something that fades to the background like the Russian Flu morphing into a bad cold or is more like an influenza strain that needs at least annual vaccines.

Two American academics, Professor Jay Bhat­tacharya and Donald Boudreaux, wrote in The Wall Street Journal last week about the vast differences between the successful eradication of smallpox and what has been achieved so far in respect of COVID-19.

“Small­pox erad­i­ca­tion re­quired a con­certed global ef­fort last­ing decades and un­prece­dented co­op­er­a­tion among na­tions,” they wrote. “Noth­ing like this is pos­si­ble to­day, es­pe­cially if it re­quires a perpetual lockdown in every coun­try on earth. That’s sim­ply too much to ask, es­pe­cially of poor coun­tries, where lockdowns have proved devastatingly harm­ful to pub­lic health. If even one non­-hu­man reservoir or a single coun­try or re­gion fails to adopt the pro­gram, zero-COVID would fail.”

The academics say history teaches us we do need to “live” with the virus and place an unrelenting priority on mass vaccinations in every country. The gruesome alternative is to go for herd immunity through mass infection – something that would never be tolerated.

One consequence of “living” with a virus like COVID is to accept that something like the morphing of the Russian Flu into a very bad cold might eventuate. Or we end up with a very nasty, long lasting coronavirus that needs to be whacked with annual vaccinations.

These threads of the COVID years – which have really only just begun – are telling reminders of the reality behind the shock and awe, silly and stupid tabloid headlines we’ve had to contend with since this virus emerged from a dark corner of Wuhan in central, southern China.

Meanwhile, we can all wait to see if the latest variants of this unwelcome guest – the World Health Organisation recognised Lambda and Delta-plus “variants of concern”- become bigger and scarier than the Delta mutation. It’s as gloomy as that.

Just as the health and social consequences of all this are punishing, the politics are playing out in brutally intense ways. Just look at the latest opinion polls and Scott Morrison’s hunted and harried face when journalists seek to hold him to account.