‘She was so much more than a statistic’: a vibrant Melbourne life cut short by Covid

"They were all saying she was coming home," Bec Rees says. Her mother, Sue, had gone into hospital in Melbourne with a burst ear drum. She also had cancer.

Then she got Covid. She didn't come home.

Sue Rees was 74, and when she died on 8 January she became one of more than 1,500 deaths reported in Australia in this latest surge of the global pandemic.

As Australia's death toll grows, we know very little about who has died. Daily press conferences reveal the rising number, often accompanied by the disclaimer that those who died had "underlying conditions".

The director and chief executive of the Burnet Institute, Prof Brendan Crabb, says that sort of language risks dividing people into the "ones we care about and the ones we don't".

Sue would have hated being a statistic, her daughter says.

"She got caught up in a system where she was just treated like a number and no one could see who she was. When you're in those hospital gowns you just become one of thousands. Faceless, soulless, you're just a nobody."