This has struck hard again, in what has been a dispiriting, debilitating nationwide pattern, with the Delta-strain outbreak in the NSW capital.

The message on Friday was dire from Premier Gladys Berejiklian, who painted a salient picture of what would happen if Sydneysiders did not accept the tightening-up of lockdown rules.

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With such low rates of full vaccination, around a cellar-dweller 10 per cent, hundreds if not thousands faced hospitalisation or death, she warned.

It's true, the message has to be replayed almost ad nauseum, as it is easy to feel like the time has arrived to move on when all's not so bad.

That was the experience in Victoria and on the Border late last year when the southern state finally emerged from its own soul-sapping lockdown regime.

Making the end of 2020 more hopeful was the realisation vaccines were not too far away, yet just over six months later the feeling is the worst might yet still be ahead of us.

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And that's all down to the vaccination debacle.

It couldn't really be called a roll-out; those 19^th Century horse-drawn prairie schooners meandering westward across the great American plains showed more spirited progress.

Some politicians have pointed to vaccine hesitancy, but that's a distraction; the Border is certainly representative of the prevailing desire to get the double-jab now.

Just to repeat - they want to, but so many in our state border closure-weary community cannot.

Until the federal government actually delivers on its supine promise to fix the Pfizer shortfall, given the unfair maligning of the widely available Astrazeneca vaccine, that will not change.

We will remain in this COVID-19 twilight zone where state authorities, on rotation, scare the hell out of us as each outbreak goes through its life cycle until, through the contact tracers-community compliance tag-team, the latest surge is snuffed out.

What is even more unlikely is a prime minister admitting that "yes, we failed".

But yes, such insight and humility cannot as yet be found.

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