COVID-19 restrictions should only be lifted when it is safe to do so for Aboriginal communities.

The NSW Government has proposed a blanket lifting of COVID-19 restrictions when the proportion of fully vaccinated people rate reaches 70% of the adult population. If implemented, this would have devastating effects on Aboriginal populations. At the present time, vaccination rates in Aboriginal communities remain low. Once restrictions are lifted, unvaccinated people will be at high risk of infection. The risks of serious illness and death among Aboriginal people from a variety of medical conditions are significantly greater than for the wider population. This is also the case with COVID-19 in First Nations populations around the world. The vulnerability of Aboriginal people is an enduring consequence of colonialism and is exacerbated by the fact that many live in overcrowded and poorly maintained houses in communities with under-resourced health services. A current workforce crisis and the demographic structure of the population have further hindered the effectiveness of vaccination programmes. Aboriginal organisations have called on state and federal governments to delay any substantial easing of restrictions until full vaccination rates among Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander populations aged 16 years and older reach 90-95%. They have also called for additional support in the form of supply of vaccines, enhancement of workforce capacity and appropriate incentives to address hesitancy. Australia remains burdened by the legacy of centuries of harm and damage to its First Nations people. Urgent steps must be taken to avoid a renewed assault on Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander health.

COVID-19-Extending Surveillance and the Panopticon.

Surveillance is a core function of all public health systems. Responses to the COVID-19 pandemic have deployed traditional public health surveillance responses, such as contact tracing and quarantine, and extended these responses with the use of varied technologies, such as the use of smartphone location data, data networks, ankle bracelets, drones, and big data analysis. Applying Foucault's (1979) notion of the panopticon, with its twin focus on surveillance and self-regulation, as the preeminent form of social control in modern societies, we examine the increasing levels of surveillance enacted during this pandemic and how people have participated in, and extended, this surveillance, self-regulation, and social control through the use of digital media. Consideration is given to how such surveillance may serve public health needs and/or political interests and whether the rapid deployment of these extensive surveillance mechanisms risks normalizing these measures so that they become more acceptable and then entrenched post-COVID-19.

Not all Bad: Sparks of Hope in a Global Disaster.

The focus of discussion about the ethical issues associated with the COVID-19 pandemic has been on the great suffering to which it has given rise. However, there may be some unexpected positive outcomes that also emerge from the global disaster. The rupturing of entrenched systems and processes, the challenging of certainties that seemed beyond question, and the disruption of the assumed consensus of modernity may contribute to a rediscovery of the challenges that compose an ethical life. Elements of such a process are evident in the surge of community support and mutual caring, of spontaneous acts of joyous solidarity, of suspension of past conflicts, and exploration of new forms of reconciliation. The experiences are tentative and the outcomes uncertain, but at least for a moment the hope of a new way forward has been raised.