After weeks of no active cases in the ACT, the realisation from local waste water testing that coronavirus is still roiling around the community delivers a reminder this potentially deadly issue is going nowhere for the foreseeable future.

The ACT waste water detection comes a day after fragments of the virus were found in three of Sydney's sewage networks at Minto, in the city's south-west, Liverpool to the west and Warriewood to the north.

On the face of it, Canberra appears to be returning to its pre-pandemic lifestyle. The shops, restaurants and coffee shops are busy again, all the main attractions have reopened and there's hardly a mask to be seen on the street.

But looking outward from our reopening environment, it's wise not to wear parochial blinkers and avert our gaze from other parts of the world where the virus news is bad and getting worse.

In Brazil, the coronavirus death toll has accelerated past 215,000. The big concern is that Brazilians who had the virus before and recovered were now being reinfected with a new variant known as P1.

It's this double-down phenomenon, and the rate of the new variant's spread that has the health system in poorer areas of the country close to collapse.

The US and India - now with 9 million infections - are in dire straights and a new strain found in South Africa, clinically known as B.1.352, has a worrying number of mutations.

Regardless of these developments - and the ramifications for opening Australia's international borders to any of these countries - mass vaccination still offers our best path out the pandemic.

Getting the public messaging right and the delivery of the jabs consistent across the population, regardless of recipients' socioeconomic circumstances, is vital.

To that end, and ahead of a planned vaccination program for all age groups, there's applicable lessons to be observed in the vaccination rates of children in the ACT. Curiously, research has revealed higher rates of vaccinations recorded across the medium and lower socioeconomic areas of Canberra than in the territory's moneyed inner north and inner south.

ACT Health authorities would be well-advised to use this data to inform its campaign.

Should, as this research suggests, the moneyed folk of the territory be less likely to roll up their sleeves, then they should be called out for it.

The coming vaccination campaign has to be as egalitarian and as complete as possible. Anything less would render useless all the good work done so far.