That’s one hour of “exercise” outdoors, which everyone gets, plus an additional hour of “recreation” for being a good lad and getting your jab.

But you can’t get caught more than five kilometers from your home. And you can’t be out after curfew regardless. And of course masks are a must.

That’s only if you live in a hot spot, though. If you live outside a hot spot, you can gather outdoors with up to five other fully vaccinated people — again, only within five kilometers of home. I’m not sure if the one-hour rule applies or not.

All of this is presented in the news segment below with the Orwellian chyron, “Fully Vaccinated Reward.”

The highly-anticipated reward for the fully vaccinated in New South Wales is tonight out in the open after Premier Gladys Berejiklian announced that fully vaccinated residents would be allowed to partake in outdoor gatherings in mid September. @BillHogan9News #9News pic.twitter.com/1MdP5tJec7

— 9News Sydney (@9NewsSyd) August 26, 2021

“Having a meal with loved ones, or having a drink with friends is just around the corner,” said the deputy premier of New South Wales in response to this exciting relaxation of restrictions for the fully vaccinated. In a month or two, or three, you might even be able to meet a date for coffee.

Although only outdoors, I’m assuming. With masks.

We really need to spend more time covering Australia’s descent into utter madness over COVID controls. It was big news in the U.S. a few days ago when the governor of Oregon reinstated a mask mandate outdoors, a precaution even the CDC hasn’t recommended given the ultra-low risk of infection. Meanwhile in Australia, the prospect of being able to go outside legally with a mask on for two hours a day instead of one is treated as a newsworthy step towards freedom. It was an honest to goodness “reward” for the state of New South Wales reaching the milestone of six million people fully vaccinated. Additional freedoms will be granted once 70 percent of the entire country is fully vaccinated.

Which may take awhile:

Then again, it might not. No western country is twisting its citizens’ arms on vaccination like Australia is, forcing them into protracted draconian lockdowns and warning them that getting out depends on hitting vaccination benchmarks. They might end up with the most breakneck vaccination pace of any nation in the world when this is over, perhaps even touching the 70 percent threshold that no one else has managed to attain yet.

The government is already preparing for that glorious day by experimenting with letting fully vaccinated people … get a haircut. If all goes well and daily vaccinations keep rolling along, they might be willing to allow other service industries to come back online — by mid-October.

Still, in spite of their ruthlessness in enforcing non-pharmaceutical interventions to limit the spread of COVID, they haven’t been able to douse the Delta brushfire yet. Australia is seeing its highest number of daily cases now of the entire pandemic:

They’re at almost a thousand per day in a nation of 25 million people. To put that in perspective, the population of Florida is around 21 million, comparable to Australia’s. Yesterday’s data:

BREAKING: Florida has more daily cases, COVID hospitalizations and virus deaths RIGHT NOW than ever before. Ever.

26,203 cases
17,164 current hospitalizations
227 deaths per day

All of those totals lead the nation.

— Ryan Bass (@Ry_Bass) August 25, 2021

Florida has recorded about as many cases in the past 48 hours as Australia has during the entire pandemic. The state has seen more deaths this past week than the Aussies have seen total since March 2020. In that sense, the country is a prisoner of its own success: If you believe that the only metric, or at least the most important metric, of success with COVID is limiting infection then Australia is probably the single most successful nation on Earth. And naturally they’re loath to lose that distinction, the logic of which impels them to stick to a plan that’s worked so well for them thus far.

It’s just that the price of that plan was, uh, having to suspend their entire society indefinitely until they achieve an extremely high, possibly unreachable level of vaccination. Even if they decided at this late date that they wanted to loosen up and follow more modest restrictions, their heavy reliance on lockdowns so far means that something like three-quarters of the population has never encountered the virus and therefore are sitting ducks for Delta.

The only way out is through. They’re stuck with lockdowns until their vaccination rate is sky high, however long it takes.

I’ll leave you with this Fox-ish rant from another news outlet founded by Rupert Murdoch about what a joke it is that the promised “reward” for fully vaccinated Aussies was one extra hour of sunshine per day. By the way, remember the guy there who got COVID and then broke quarantine, sparking a police manhunt? They caught up to him and arrested him. “Public health enemy number one,” the police called him.