
In five months Victoria has gone from recording 700 new COVID-19 cases daily to recording 31 days of 'donuts'.
That's how jovial 'zero case days' have become. How celebratory and commonplace the daily update, when compared to the devastating reality of only a few months ago.
We're only just starting to comprehend the damage one of the harshest lockdowns in the world had on the mental health and livelihoods of the millions that call the southern state home. But there's no denying that it also saved hundreds, if not thousands of lives.
For the last five months, one man has shouldered the brunt of the country's criticism as the state blindly fought its way through an emergency being fought the world over, using a tactic torn apart by the masses.
Watch: As the lockdown stretched on, Victorians started to lose patience.
And yet as the cries of 'Dictator Dan' grew louder, Daniel Andrews stood up every single day, for five months straight, and stood his ground. Determined to push forward with his controversial approach.
In recent months, as The Age reports, there have been almost as many mentions of the name 'Daniel Andrews' as that of 'Scott Morrison' in the public discourse, as the entire country watched him fight, sometimes seemingly alone, for what his government thought would get them through the coronavirus storm.
In daily press conferences, the exhausted premier would field questions designed to trip him up and create 'gotcha moments' that media organisations could transform into juicy headlines to feed a public hungry for news. It was his government, after all, that is also being investigated for the bungled hotel quarantine scheme that landed them in their COVID-19 mess in the first place.
Then he'd spend the rest of the day getting pressure from above, with the prime minister and his government publicly expressing "profound disappointment" in the state's decisions.
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