Morrison's political judgement goes missing on rapid antigen test debacle

By Mark Kenny, Professor, Australian Studies Institute, Australian National University

January 3 2022 was a day like most others in the roughly two years of the COVID-19 pandemic preceding it – except it wasn’t.

Despite reassurances from a federal government desperate to consign the health emergency to history, it was a day in which the number of new infections in every state (bar Western Australia, which is closed off) soared to record highs.

Hospital admissions were spiking too, even though intensive care admissions remained lower than the worst days of the Delta outbreak, due to the apparently milder effects of the Omicron variant and high community vaccination…

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