It’s a battle of ‘experts’ with health academics calling for workers with flexible employment arrangements to work from home, as new COVID threats hit the population. Meanwhile, economic experts ponder what another bout of forced lockdowns or quasi voluntary lockdowns will do to an economy already under the pressure from a rapid rise in interest rates.

Michael Read, writing in the AFR tells us that COVID-19 infections “jumped 31 per cent” across the country as an apparent fourth wave of this pesky virus spreads.

Last week the recorded count of the new strand of the virus was 79,700, while the last week of October had 33,600 struck down by what has been tagged as a “variant soup”.

Deakin University associate professor in epidemiology Hassan Vally says the latest wave is a mixture of “new omicron sub-variants XBB and BQ.1, as well as existing sub-variants such BA.5.”

That’s bad news for those concerned about Aussies’ health and the health of businesses and the economy. But the good news is that Doc Vally says the infection surge, while expected to be quite aggressive in its spreading, should be brief.

In case you missed it, according to our Chief Medical Officer Paul Kelly, we’re around the middle of this new wave. And based on what happened in Singapore, the peak is near.

At this stage, the Albanese Government isn’t hitting the panic button and the AFR says Health Minister Mark Butler isn’t up for tougher restrictions, including the reintroduction of mask mandates, mandatory isolation periods and working from home.

“I don’t think there’s any evidence yet there would be the need to move to those sorts of restrictions,” he said.

At this stage it looks like the powers that be aren’t seeing infections as being the same as deaths (or the likelihood of deaths) and clearly the availability of drugs to treat these variants (of the virus that closed down the world economy in 2020) mean we don’t have to overreact and shut the place down when new medical threats come to town.

The big challenge for employees will be whether they stay home when the Christmas party is held. And many pub and restaurant owners will be worried about possible cancellations of these end-of-year celebrations.

Clearly, people with real medical problems will avail themselves of the opportunity to work at home. But for everyone else, it’s time to stop panicking about every new news story of some new variant of this damn virus.

As a nation, via our governments, we bankrolled through bigger budget deficits a safe approach to the Coronavirus, which threatened many businesses, many of which are still trying to recover. We can’t ignore new health threats but also we can’t overreact, hamper businesses and expect the nation’s taxpayers or business owners to pick up the bill.