Dear Premier: If we’re living with Covid, then locking up Covid-free South Australians for 14 days must come to an end

SA’s household close-contact rules are so absurd kids with the virus get out long before their Covid-free parents. This has to change, writes Liz Walsh.

Like so many South Australians, our household has been hit by Covid.

On Friday, 10 days ago, when our 10-year-old daughter woke with a sore throat, we immediately took her – and our eight-year-old son – to get a PCR test. While his result came back negative, hers came back positive.

That night, husband Renato and I headed back to Victoria Park for PCR tests as well, just to be sure. By Saturday morning, they’d both come back negative.

We live in a modest house, with one toilet and one bathroom.

There is no extra living space, which means separating our daughter from the rest of the family has been difficult.

Under the rules, it’s 14 days in quarantine for us. Seven for her.

The former government’s message of late has been perfectly clear: Go, live your lives; go dancing at WOMADelaide, head to your nearest nightclub, drink your alcohol standing up, book tickets to Fringe shows, head to your nearest restaurants.

And yet, the consequence of someone in your household testing positive remains exactly the same as when South Australia was aiming for Covid-zero.

We’ve diligently followed the rules, including routine RAT testing (negative all the way) and we completely endorse that catching Covid requires quarantine – this is best for the health and safety of the general community.

Huge crowds enjoyed dancing and singing at WOMADelaide. Picture: Brenton Edwards

But to keep Covid-free people shut in their houses for a week longer than Covid-positive patients seems like cruel and unusual punishment.

It should be a priority of new Premier Peter Malinauskas to reduce the quarantine for household contacts to a more-reasonable length, perhaps seven days.

These current rules have meant that we are both working from home in a house that is not adequately designed for it. We’re either alternating using a makeshift desk in our bedroom, or working from our dining table, occasionally dodging balls thrown by our exuberant son.

Naturally our work productivity has suffered.

A friend said day 8 would be the toughest. And she was right. We spent most of the day lying on the couch. Washing has piled up.

Today is day 10. We’re missing going walking in the hilly streets around our house, we’re out of milk.

Our daughter headed back to school this morning, thanks to the help of her nonna, and she was over the moon.

She left her brother on the couch watching the Bahrain GP. Ferrari won, so the day started well. Hopefully it ends with some light at the end of this two-week tunnel.

Huge crowds enjoyed WOMADelaide this year. Picture: Brenton Edwards

By the time our quarantine has ended, our son will have missed two full weeks of school – but the school system is no longer geared towards online learning, so there have been no daily online messages from teachers, just emailed worksheets that full-time working parents are trying to get him to complete (incredibly unsuccessfully).

One of my friends tested positive at the weekend: we’ll be out of isolation on the same day.

Another frustration is that there appears to be no advantage to being vaccinated. We are both triple-vaxxed, our kids were able to get one dose in before Covid struck. And yet it makes no impact on the length of our quarantine.

SA’s new Premier, Peter Malinauskas. Picture: NCA NewsWire/Kelly Barnes

And we’re left with a lingering sense of anger and frustration and a desperation to leave the house: we’ve gone to get PCRs instead of using RATs for an excursion; we made an event of our quick drive around the corner to the local post box to deliver our state election postal votes.

We’re grateful for family and friends who have dropped off food. We were drowning in pasta sauce in the first few days of our isolation. We’re grateful that NewsCorp has a generous carer’s leave policy that we’ve been able to access.

The irony of it all, though, is that if we actually contracted Covid when our daughter did, we’d be better off – back out in the community by now, walking the streets, popping to the shops for some milk.