You aren’t stopping Covid. You are postponing it. Covid is a weaponized virus. It will get to everyone. I am immunized, I practice social distancing and I contracted Delta. It’s that contagious.
Remember, the Delta variant hit here in June. Warm weather made it worse. Covid is not causing the lockdowns. The government is doing that.
We actually do understand that. Even the people making the lockdown decisions understand it. The assumption is that eventually nearly all Australians will be infected. But vaccination does seem to give a great deal of protection against serious illness from COVID. It dramatically lowers the death rate.
For various reasons, Australia's vaccination rollout has been much slower than it should have been - we're still at less than 50% of adults having had two vaccine doses. That's a long way behind other similar countries. And it is mostly down to supply issues - not reluctance to be vaccinated. On current numbers, we should reach 70% in about a month, and 80% in early November. At those points, it's considered safer to open up even if lots of people wind up infected after that.
Now, as I've said, I don't support most of the lockdowns. And I do think we should be pretty much opened up already - but even the people who are making the lockdown decisions, even paranoids like Daniel Andrews, have pretty much accepted the reality we have to open up more at 70% and then even more at 80%. There's still some question as to whether they'll be willing to accept we might never get much higher than that (polling and studies here suggest 80% of adults are likely to agree to be vaccinated, but not much more than that) and what they will do then - hopefully they will accept reality, but even if they don't it will be much better than things are now, and we'll cross that bridge when we come to it. Even getting these paranoids to this stage has taken huge effort.