Michael McGuire: It’s a very fragile system that can be brought down with one lie
This draconian debacle will stand with one-way freeways, blackouts and serial killers on the list of Adelaide punchlines, writes Michael McGuire.
It was just yesterday, or was it three years ago, that a Melbourne friend sent me a message. She said South Australia was enduring “cruel and unusual punishment’’. For someone not long out of her own 112 days lockdown, I thought that was … interesting.
But she was right yesterday. And she’s probably even more right today.
True, we will only in be lockdown for three days, with bits of it already relaxed, but the strains, stresses and anxieties of this week will live long in the memory.
Draconian and debacle are two words you don’t want to see lined up next to each other, but that’s where we are at.
You can’t ignore chief public health officer Nicola Spurrier, Police Commissioner Grant Stevens or Premier Steven Marshall created mass public panic this week. I’m not questioning their motivations, but their judgement and PR skills are open to interrogation.
As well as the logic of some of the more severe restrictions which have done a lot of damage to a lot of people.
Those restrictions contrasted with the previously lax approach to testing when it came to those working in medi-hotels.
Marshall admitted this week that he had questioned why workers hadn’t been more rigorously tested but was told “best practice’’ was being followed.
That was a failure of science and Marshall should have followed his gut instinct and insisted.
Spurrier and Marshall did their best to put the fear of God into us, talking of mutating, sneaky viruses, making it sound like Adelaide was on the verge of the zombie apocalypse.
A claim some epidemiologists have debunked. Stevens getting shirty about legitimate questions, that just about everyone in Adelaide was asking, doesn’t lend a sense of calm either
It was all taken on board by the public and the results were clear.
People coped less well with this lockdown than the last.
Maybe it’s just because we are all so very tired after a long and difficult year. Maybe we’d convinced ourselves we were through this.
We saw the pictures from Britain, from Europe, from the United States, from Victoria and decided that wasn’t us. Then went harder than any of them.
You could see it in the shops on the first day. The rush to the supermarket, the endless lines. We had panic buying last time as well, but I don’t remember having to line up to buy carrots.
We had people sitting in cars with restless kids for 12 hours waiting to be tested. Others standing in the sun for hours on end.
We had school students pretty much resigned to not seeing their friends and classmates until next year. People shouting from hotel balconies.
Perhaps it was the suddenness of the eruption. It was hard to process how the momentum had changed from lifting all restrictions to a complete shutdown.
And now we start to move back, leaving us with the thought that it’s a very fragile system that can be brought down with one lie.
This week will be added to the list of South Australian punchlines. It will sit alongside blackouts, one-way freeways and serial killers.
But its also more serious than that. The mental health fallout from this week could be more severe than the first lockdown.
Today is one of the most confusing days in SA history.
Maybe it seems the worst is over but we are going to have to help each other, be kind to each other, for a long time to come.
