One thing that the pandemic has really brought home is how much I hate the word/concept "safe", when presented as a universal good. No, I don& #39;t want to be "safe", in the absolute sense that its advocates mean. I want to trade costs and benefits, cos that& #39;s what maximises utility.

That doesn& #39;t mean advocating for mad nonsense like Trump, but it also doesn& #39;t mean keeping tens of thousands of citizens living overseas in misery barred from returning in case one of them breaches quarantine and the resulting mini-cluster kills a local.

Similarly Morrison has done a bad job of pushing this politically, because he isn& #39;t very good, but he& #39;s right that it& #39;s immoral to ban families and friends who live across state borders from seeing one another, when the risk that these bans are supposedly mitigating is near-zero.

We& #39;re seeing two equally insane and extreme covid positions emerge in Australia, and only the marginal one with no prospect of happening ("let it rip"/Qaren) gets the opprobrium that it deserves, whereas no amount of misery inflicted is too great to invalidate the cult of zero.