How are Australians feeling after more than two years of Covid? Exhausted, mostly

Pedestrians cross Bourke Street in Melbourne. Workplace attendance in Australia has returned to December 2021 levels, according to Google mobility data, and public transport use has also climbed, but Covid cases remain high. Photograph: Diego Fedele/AAP

The pandemic is still happening, but it is no longer front-page news. It has been pushed off by devastating floods, the war in Ukraine, increasingly dire warnings about a global climate breakdown, one celebrity hitting another celebrity, and the pending federal election.

And yet, all around us, people are testing positive to Covid-19. The graph of Australia’s case numbers shows a sharp spike over early January, when the first Omicron wave saw more than 100,000 new cases reported each day, and it is starting to rise again.