Matthew Abraham: Confusing and contradictory – the dramatic shift in SA’s pandemic playbook

The messaging coming from the government on the pandemic in the last week has been both confusing and contradictory, writes Matthew Abraham.

When the bodies-in-the-barrels murders exploded all over an innocent Snowtown, the police formed an impressive taskforce.

It was a 33-person team, consisting of detectives and forensic experts, untangling the bizarre web of deceit of one of Australia’s worst mass murders that claimed 12 victims.

Fast forward 21 years, and Police Commissioner Grant Stevens has created a taskforce of 20 detectives to investigate a single alleged lie told by a pizza shop worker, as the government tries to unravel the COVID-19 Parafield cluster.

Nobody died from that porky and, so far, nobody appears to have become terribly sick from it.

This is not to say it’s not worth police attention.

But let the comparison sit on the kitchen table for a bit. Make of it what you will.

I was working in The Australian’s Adelaide bureau the day the barrels were discovered in Snowtown’s bank vault, so headed to the beaut little Mid North town in one almighty hurry.

The joint was jumping with journos.

There ain’t no snow in Snowtown and, back then, there wasn’t much mobile reception, either. We balanced on the concrete picnic tables next to the railway line in the main street, phones held aloft seeking a signal. It cut a comical silhouette as the sun set.

One fellow hack observed of Snowtown’s locals: “They’re loving us today but they’ll hate us tomorrow.” And so they did.

Saint Nicola Spurrier sticker. Picture: Just Adelaide Things

There’s a fine line between pleasure and pain. And there’s a fine line, too, between saints and sinners.

This is something the state’s chief public health officer, Nicola Spurrier, should keep in mind. We call her Saint Nicola and with good reason, because she’s been a terrific presence in the lives of all South Australians from the first days of this pandemic.

When the cheeky website Just Adelaide Things produced a batch of Saint Nicola car stickers last weekend – portraying the chief public health officer as the Virgin Mary surrounded by roses and swallows – they sold out within hours. A second run is being printed.

Premier Steven Marshall must see Professor Spurrier as manna from heaven, because he’s relied exclusively on the blessings of the chief public health officer to inform and reassure us.

He gets Police Commissoner Grant Stevens to tell us off.

The last seven days, however, have seen a marked shift in the dynamic of the government’s pandemic playbook.

The now-you-see-it-now-you-don’t total lockdown was profoundly unsettling, and not just for the business community.

The messages coming from the government have become confusing and contradictory.

It’s attempting to juggle the twin tasks of getting the Parafield outbreak under control, while covering its political arse.

Chief public health officer Professor Nicola Spurrier. Phto: Roy Van Der Vegt / NCA Newswire.

After stubbornly arguing Adelaide’s quarantine hotels were “very, very secure”, the government on Wednesday flipped 180 degrees, preparing to transfer all positive COVID-19 cases from Peppers medi-hotel to a dedicated hospital, probably Calvary’s old Wakefield hospital.

Mr Marshall’s new “eight-point plan” reads like a carbon copy of the Opposition plan he ridiculed a week ago.

In a week, he’s gone from “no risk” to “never zero risk” with the virus.

On Tuesday, Prof Spurrier was upbeat about containing the Parafield cluster. “I haven’t popped the cork on the champagne bottle yet, but the champagne’s on ice,” she said.

Within hours, she revealed two people had caught COVID-19 while confined inside a medi-hotel. The bubbly’s now getting warm.

She described the virus as sneaky and “even more transmissible and more contagious than I probably even imagined”.

SA Health has provided no evidence the Parafield coronavirus is some sort of unique super-spreader strain, or any more or less deadly or sneaky than it is anywhere else.

One of the nation’s leading experts on sneaky viruses, Prof Peter Collignon, from the ANU’s medical school of infectious diseases, tells me he’s seen “no convincing evidence this is a new strain” and it’s almost certainly the strain we’ve flown in with travellers from the UK, US and India.

The Premier’s office shouldn’t rely on Prof Spurrier to provide the grab of the day for the night’s TV news, not while Mr Marshall maintains his convenient social distance from actually sitting on the transition committee meetings.

In Saint Nicola we trust? Let’s keep it that way, bless her.