In my column in The Herald today I argue that there are pressing lessons to be learnt from the swine flu pandemic, and foremost among them is that the nation's plan to protect us from a pandemic didn't work. Not even a little bit. Swine flu is throughout the nation, in even remote communities, and four in 10 people tested are found to have the virus. It is expected that this figure will climb to seven in 10. A month ago a senior Victorian virologist estimated that one in three of that state's people had picked up the swine flu virus.

Exhortations to cover our mouths when sneezing, to wash our hands, to lift our personal hygiene are, when we think about it, spitting on a fire. Avoiding people with obvious flu symptoms doesn't help much when these people were freely spreading the virus before their symptoms became obvious and, perhaps, apparent to even themselves.

Bear in mind that swine flu could have been deadly. The Spanish flu that killed tens of millions of people in 1918 and 1919 did so by causing them to drown in their haemorrhaging lungs within a day or two. No time to develop the pneumonia that is a common cause of death in lesser flu pandemics.

The bureaucracy's failure to limit the pandemic suggests to me that the most effective course for an individual in time of pandemic is to assume responsibility for ourselves. And the surest way of ensuring our safety, and that of family members, is to retreat as early as possible to isolation. I'd imagine that this would be at home, with a locked gate.

Neither government nor bureaucracy would tell us to withdraw from our work, at least not until a deadly pandemic was out of control and perhaps not even then, so if such isolation is the safest course it is to be the individual's decision.

Am I over-reacting? Does the swine flu fizzer tell us, instead, that we worry without cause?