Last month, a delegation led by Brendan Crabb, head of the Burnet Institute, a prestigious medical research body, met Anthony Albanese in the Prime Minister's Parliament House office. or signup to continue reading Its members, who included Lidia Morawska from Queensland University of Technology, a world-leading expert on air quality and health, also blitzed ministers and staffers. They were pitching for the federal government to spearhead a comprehensive policy on clean indoor air and for the issue to be put on the national cabinet's agenda.
They pointed out to Albanese that indoor air is an outlier in our otherwise comprehensive public health framework. Despite people spending the majority of their time inside, indoor air quality is mostly unregulated, in contrast to the standards that apply to, for example, food and water. There are multiple health and economic reasons to be concerned about this air quality but a major one is to limit the transmission of airborne diseases, such as COVID.
For many of us, COVID has become just a bad memory, despite its lasting and mixed legacies. For instance, without the pandemic, fewer people would now be working from home. More small businesses would be flourishing in our CBDs.
Arguably, fewer children would be trying to catch up from inadequate schooling. While the media have largely lost interest in COVID, and people are now rather blase about it, the disease is still taking a toll. In 2023 there were about 4600 deaths attributed to COVI.