Then, on October 5, Dominic Perrottet took over as NSW Premier, and two days later began his ideologically driven push to open the state.

Ignoring the wowsers who prioritised human lives over the economy, he told the state's Chief Medical Officer, Kerry Chant, that she'd no longer be required at press conferences. "We can't live in a hermit kingdom", he insisted.

By October 25 he was busy screeching his success.

"We've been able to get people back into work, businesses open again, and provide greater opportunity for people", he trumpeted. And, although he didn't bother to mention it, create an environment in which a newly identified and (inevitably) more virulent strain of the virus could flourish.

Today the rest of Australia is living with the results of his experiments. This is what happens when you privilege "the economy" without bothering to erect proper defences to protect people. More than 2 million of the state's residents remained unvaccinated when Perrottet decided, against medical advice, to open up. Virtually nobody had received Pfizer boosters and new treatments were just becoming available, but the Premier didn't care. He insisted everything would be fine, and the previous defences - the same ones that had ensured this country had one of the lowest death rates in the world - were no longer necessary. He urged everyone to just "push through", as if triumphing over the virus was simply a matter of determination and will.

Perrottet squawked. He parroted ill-informed rubbish, with a combination of Boris Johnson's foresight and the intellectual acumen of Donald Trump.

Was it any surprise that by mid-December everything had changed? The infection rate skyrocketed, and the virus spread faster in Sydney over Christmas than anywhere else in the world. Reassured by the Premier's promises that everything would be OK, families and friends came together. The result, two weeks later, was so utterly predictable, so completely inevitable, as to be almost boring.

This is what happens when you open to the virus without ensuring proper defences are in place. Overstretched medical staff don't have the time or capacity to work out which variant of the disease is dominant, and are left to fight in the dark. Unpreparedness means there are insufficient quantities of the newly available drugs, resulting in unnecessary deaths. Just holding on for a couple of months longer would have meant lives could have been saved, and vindicated all the hard work that had achieved so much for so long. Perrottet threw everything away.

Proportionately, NSW now has one of the fastest transmission rates (and highest death tolls) in the world. The virus is rushing through communities of vulnerable people who'd previously been protected. On Friday, for example, the state announced another 46 deaths (including six under 60, all male), 68 people requiring ventilation, 209 in intensive care (including many under 40), and 2743 in hospital.

And Perrottet's response?

Did this ideologically driven Premier pause, even for a moment, to reflect if perhaps there might have been another way? If rather than just ploughing forward open-slather it might, perhaps, have been preferable to warn people about what was coming instead of just insisting there are "reassuring signs" and everything is for the best in this best of all possible worlds?

Of course not. Today the surge continues uncontrolled. It will only stop when it has spread so far through the community that it exhausts itself. That's why Perrottet is so adamant that Western Australia should remove the hard border that's "keeping us apart". It's because he understands how bad the contrast between healthy, unlocked Perth and frightened, fragile Penrith will appear when we finally tally up the toll from COVID.

So what can we learn from all this? Firstly, distrust ideologues.

Perrottet believes in himself and speaks with confidence, but that's no guarantee of anything other than a gullible mind. He decided to ignore medical advice because he thought he could understand things that others didn't.

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Secondly some - like me - might find it difficult to have a great deal of sympathy for those who rejected vaccination and are now infected. Break those numbers down into individual stories, however, and suddenly it becomes possible to understand that everyone's circumstances are very different. Generalisations fall apart under close examination, and not all who are dying are somehow to blame, simply because they didn't take a vaccine when it was offered to them. Some couldn't risk it because they had other medical conditions, while others, in less privileged circumstances, didn't get the chance to be inoculated with the best protection or receive the best treatment in conditions of scarcity. While patting ourselves on the back at our cleverness in avoiding the disease, it's worth pausing for a moment to recognise that luck always plays a role in good fortune.

And finally, the media.

News helps us discover what's going on, but it doesn't show us the way forward. Don't look at the numbers that are proffered up on the television screens at night: ask, rather, what numbers aren't there. The statistics might make us feel informed because we know how many patients are in intensive care units, but this is just the first step towards illumination.

We need to know if there are enough trained staff, and how many others are waiting for beds in other wards. We need to understand if hospitals are being provided with the new drug treatments that are saving lives overseas, and if there are enough of these to go around. Health departments are understandably reluctant to provide information that reveals their deficiencies, but this simply protects politicians who are, unfortunately, the people who benefit most from such cover-ups.

Truth isn't a simple commodity that can be wrapped up in a number and presented as a solution. We need to continue looking beyond the figures if we want to understand what they mean. Don't trust the charlatans who try to pretend they're in control. They're not waving - they're drowning. They'll take you down with them.