David Penberthy: Whether ill or not, my day with Jay wasn’t the end of the world

He’s stuck in isolation following a chat with Covid-infected former premier Jay Weatherill – but at least David Penberthy can see the funny side.

Many years ago the British magazine Punch ran an amusing if off-colour pocket cartoon featuring a group of bowler-hatted businessmen stuck in a motionless elevator.

The caption read: “I would have thought, Smithers, given we have been trapped in this lift for all of five minutes that the need to drink each other’s urine had not yet arisen.”

I always remembered this cartoon as aside from its warped fetishistic undertones, it provides an excellent case study in the nature of panic. I was thinking about it this week as it emerged that me, my family and a whole bunch of my mates all needed to go into isolation and have Covid tests on account of having had close contact with someone who has tested positive for Covid.

The natural inclination might be to panic but the reality is that the entire process has largely been a relief, and a heartening demonstration of how a highly vaccinated community like ours can deal with a problem that’s showing no signs yet of going way.

The poor bloke who inadvertently plunged us into this drama is the former premier of South Australia, Jay Weatherill, who came into the studio for an interview with me and my co-host Will Goodings at our Adelaide radio station last Tuesday.

Weatherill is now based in Perth, where he works as CEO of the Twiggy Forrest-funded Thrive by Five initiative promoting better funding for early childhood education, which was the subject of our chat.

Weatherill’s trip to SA combined business and pleasure, the pleasure bit being a school reunion with some 50 of his old mates from Henley High. It was at that event, with South Australia’s borders now open to the entire nation, some guests from the eastern states arrived, not knowing they had Covid, and sparked a superspreader event which as of Thursday totalled 16 cases.

Jay Weatherill in the FIVEaa studio with David Penberthy and Will Goodings.

The number 16 might sound faintly hilarious to readers in NSW and Victoria. If you had just 16 cases in one day in Melbourne you’d all run naked down Collins St dancing, pashing strangers and necking champagne bottles while standing up. In Adelaide though, 16 is a hell of a lot, as us South Australians lulled ourselves into thinking that Covid almost didn’t exist, after several successive months with zero local cases.

Because of the 10-minute face-to-face interview we did with Jay Weatherill, my co-host and I were designated as close contacts, as were our two producers. My wife was roped into it too as she had lunch with Mr Weatherill the day before as she is also working on early childhood stuff, and our four-year-old son was at the lunch too.

What happened since then has been reassuring. All of us have had Covid tests – including another mate who happened to bump into Weatherill while he was at lunch at a Central Market cafe with my wife – and all of us have tested negative. We are all doubly vaccinated, which is a very strong demonstration that the benefit of having the jab is that you can sit next to a bloke with full-blown Covid and emerge just fine on the other side.

The biggest downside to all this so far has been business related. As a result of us being declared close contacts and requiring to isolate for seven days, the economic impact on our business and others has been significant. Out of an abundance of caution, just in case the infection has spread but not yet been detected, work was forced to cancel last Friday’s Christmas party, which would have represented a sizeable hit to the restaurant we had booked out in its entirety for around 100 of us to have dinner.

We also cancelled a major dinner for our listeners next Tuesday at another restaurant, which will leave that business out of pocket as it will be unable to book out the same amount of tables in such a short space of time. We also cancelled an event this coming Thursday for all of our advertisers, which aside from being an important part of the business to thank them for sticking by us in tough commercial times, is also a big whack to the caterers who will no longer be required for the event.

This part of the process shows that as Covid continues to move through the community, the health bureaucracy is going to have to become smarter and more confident in processing these cases. It begs the question – in a highly vaccinated community, why do we keep slamming things shut for extended periods when we have been told that double vaccination is the key to safety?

Then there’s the iso part of it. I only found out on Thursday that I officially needed to isolate for seven days from my contact with Mr Weatherill, so by the time I got the news I could almost see the finish line. And seven days? Far out, anyone in SA who’s complaining about that should ring their mates in Victoria and walk a mile in their shoes.

There is still something oddly bracing about being told you can’t leave the house. Entire days often go by in my life when I don’t leave the house anyway. Being told that you can’t makes it feel all the more imposing, even though it’s basically a legally-mandated version of what frequently happens in my unexciting domestic existence.

None of those problems can’t be addressed with the help of loving relatives to do the food shopping and the promise of alcohol delivery in under two hours via the Dan Murphys app.

Overall, unlike that weird guy in the lift, there seems no reason to panic. The past few days have been messy. Doing a radio show from home on Microsoft Teams is no real fun. And we need to ensure that businesses do not continue to suffer unnecessary financial hits from paranoid rulings that undermine the promise that came with getting vaccinated.

But if this is what living with Covid looks like, provided you’ve had your shots, none of this looks like the end of the world.