The World Health Organization declared COVID-19 a pandemic on 11 March 2020.
Five years later, is Australia better prepared for the next one?
What happened during the COVID-19 pandemic?
"It's called a pandemic because pan means 'everything'," associate professor Sanjaya Senanayake told SBS News.
"And it's because a pandemic affects all countries, but it's a pandemic in another sense.
"Everything was touched."
The infectious diseases specialist from the Australian National University said "communication and trust between the public and federal and local government" was key to Australia's ability to manage the pandemic.
"Although it certainly can be better in the future," he added.
"It was the first true pandemic that we had seen in a hundred years, and it disrupted life globally in a way that we'd never seen it before.
"It is something that we will never forget, although I think people are trying very hard to forget it."
Responding to a global challenge
Johns Hopkins University's Coronavirus Resource Center stopped collecting and reporting data on global COVID cases on 10 March 2023.
How did Australia react to COVID-19?
Professor Paul Kelly remembers the early days better than most.
He was Australia's deputy chief medical officer at the time, later becoming chief medical officer in December 2020.
"In that first year in particular ... people suddenly became very aware of what epidemiologists did," he said.
"They knew how to spell it, they knew how to say it."
As time moved on, so did people's understanding of public health.
"They understood modelling, they understood infectious diseases and how they transmit. They knew a lot about vaccines," Kelly said.
"That was really helpful for us to be able to use that new knowledge to assist people in their decision making."
Former chief medical officer Paul Kelly says 2022 was Australia's "pandemic year". Source: SBS News
'We did not have the wise and rational voices'
Kelly said during 2022, "lots of echo chambers were formed".
In September and October 2021, NSW and Victoria respectively stopped government COVID-19 press briefings and by 2022 Kelly said by 2022 "no one wanted to talk about COVID anymore".
While he was supportive of the end of the daily press briefings — "people were totally sick of that. We certainly were" — he said "having a complete vacuum" of messaging provided an opportunity for dis- and misinformation to spread.
"And I think what happened in April of 2022, where mainly no one wanted to talk about COVID anymore, the media lost its interest, but for Australia, that was our pandemic year and we did not have the rational and reasonable voices of the chief health officers in the states and territories and at the national level that we'd had for two years nonstop before that," he said.
"And I think that was a problem because that's where I think a lot of the disinformation misinformation and a lack of trust can be put back to."
"Trust is hard to win and easy to lose," Kelly said, adding that restoring trust in expertise "will be a major issue for us going to the next pandemic".
"The Australian public was enormously trusting of medical advice and the politicians that were in charge at the national and the state and territory level. I'm not sure that that's the case now."
Are we ready for the next one?
"I think yes and no," Kelly said.
He said pandemics are inevitable and worries about "global preparedness".
"I think one of the key lessons from the COVID pandemic was that we were not prepared as much as we thought we were," he said.
"There was a tendency for us to hide behind our border and to ignore the rest of the world. And Australia can be counted in that unfortunate statistic as well."
Senanayake thinks "we have the tools to be ready for the next pandemic, but we still have to do a lot of work."
"What is really important is that we can't forget," he said.
"We look at the lessons or the and we plan according to that because the next pandemic might just be around the corner."
