At the start and finish of a press conference in Canberra yesterday, Prime Minister Scott Morrison said he wanted to thank the 335,420 people who had doses of coronavirus vaccine administered the day before.
That's an enormous number - almost 1.3 per cent of our estimated 25.8 million population - and it must reflect a massive effort across all of the arms of this country's vaccination machine.
Mr Morrison described the journey towards the desired vaccination rates as "this march of hope".
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It will also be, for many people, a march of trepidation, because modelling from the government's transition advisers, the Doherty Institute, predicts that ending lockdowns once 70 per cent of over-16s were vaccinated would be followed by between 13 and 1457 deaths, and 2737 and 386,983 infections, in just six months, depending on the "public health measures" used instead of lockdowns.
These figures are at the heart of a statement this week by the Doherty Institute for Infection and Immunity (to give the organisation its full name), summarising the outcomes of its complex modelling for the general population.
The statement compares COVID with influenza, saying Australia typically records about 600 deaths from about 200,000 flu cases each year.
Such numbers are indeed significant, but they are well below the 1500 coronavirus fatalities the institute says are possible in just half the time.
And they do not take into account the real differences between the viruses themselves.
As fatal as influenza can be, it is an adversary we are used to dealing with.
This is not the case with COVID, which still holds many surprises despite an unprecedented global research effort since the Wuhan outbreak.
In NSW, we are learning first-hand how entrenched this virus can become.
Yesterday's editorial observed that 919 cases put us close to talking about cases in the thousands, not the hundreds.
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Now, at 1029 cases, that distinction is behind us. Hopes of a plateau in numbers are evaporating.
Two months have passed since Premier Gladys Berejiklian was applauded for restricting the Sydney lockdown to four council areas.
Yesterday Deputy Premier John Barilaro justified continued lockdowns in zero-case regions, saying "you can't be an island surrounded by cases".
The virus was in charge in June, and it's in charge now.
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