The crazy, confusing and head-spinning decisions of the Covid response
Readers have had their say on the most baffling parts of our Covid response with one man and his dreaded jacket featuring.
Victoria
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Readers have had their say on what we overlooked in the head-spinning list of baffling moments from the Covid response.
Here are the top 10 suggestions:
1. The CovidSafe app which cost $21m and appears to have nationally identified just two positive cases.
2. The crude cutting in half of communities by “ring of steel” measures and border closures.
3. Premier Dan Andrews’ demand that we do not “get on the beers”.
4. People resorting to carrying empty coffee cups so that they didn’t need to wear masks.
5. The essential worker childcare confusion. Did one or both parents have to be “essential” for childcare to be allowed?
6. The stultifying array of categories of essential and non-essential workplaces that at times meant that churches were closed but Bunnings and brothels were open.
7. Lockdowns triggered by threats – such as coronavirus fragments detected in wastewater tests – later shown to be misleading.
8. Chief health officer Brett Sutton’s description of the Kappa variant as a “beast” – did this qualify the subsequent Delta variant as a “super freaky monster beast”?
9. The omnipresence and folklore around the dreaded North Face jacket.
10. The twee celebration, and accompanying photo-ops, of so-called “doughnut days”.
The Covid calls that still rankle as pandemic ends
It’s official – at midnight Wednesday, the pandemic is declared over.
So what were the craziest, most confusing and head-spinning decisions of the Covid response here in Melbourne and Victoria?
Below are 77 statements, decisions and examples of overreach that to this day make you shake your head and wonder.
1. An “abundance of caution is never a bad thing,” Premier Daniel Andrews says. Yes, after six lockdowns over 262 days, sometimes it is.
2. The promise of a “short, sharp” lockdown. We now know that “short, sharp” lockdowns usually become months-long lockdowns.
3. When walking down the street is permissible, but “only with a valid reason”.
4. Elderly mothers being separated from their children and funerals being barred from most loved ones.
5. The terminally ill being deprived of final farewells.
6. The debasement of “the science”, which is not based solely on evidence-based facts but instead confected on guesses, assumptions, an abiding lack of trust and political expediency.
7. The language of fearmongering, a constant over almost two years. The virus does “not discriminate”. The virus is a “wicked enemy”, to be likened to Lucifer’s little helper.
8. Bans on golf and fishing – even by yourself – are mostly adhered to, even by those who reject the policies. “No trip to the golf course is worth someone’s life,” Premier Dan Andrews explains. Yet no trip to the golf course would have risked anyone’s life, either.
CAN YOU THINK OF ONE WE LEFT OUT? COMMENT BELOW
9. Allowing Black Lives Matter protesters to gather in June, 2020, even though the rest of the state is largely unable to attend funerals and/or weddings.
10. The willingness to fine Victorians for choices that would ordinarily be normal.
11. The absurdly inflated penalty of these fines. At first, they are $1650, which is rather hefty for what are sometimes unwitting errors or choices driven by despair. Then they rise to $5000, which could buy a car.
12. A ban on couples sleeping at each other’s houses. “That’s not work, that’s not care giving, that’s not medical care … it does not comply with the rules … ” Andrews says of the very short-lived policy, which comes to be known as the “bonk ban”.
13. Old women being confronted by police on a park bench.
14. Police searching the shopping bag of a woman in the CBD.
15. The needlessly melodramatic arrest of pregnant mother Zoe Lee Buhler – with handcuffs, in her pink pyjamas at home – for posting about a lockdown protest.
16. A Greek funeral being interrupted when police enter the church to do a head check.
17. A learner driver being fined $1652 (later rescinded) for a lesson with her mum because the activity was “non-essential”.
18. A delivery man being fined (later rescinded) for washing his car at an otherwise empty car wash at 1.15am.
19. Victoria’s deputy chief health officer Annaliese van Diemen posting a tweet comparing Covid’s arrival to that of Captain Cook in 1770.
20. The first reckoning of the pandemic in Victoria being the spread of Covid through the use of largely untrained and unmanaged private security guards for the hotel quarantine of returned travellers.
21. Soldiers or police could guard arrivals housed in hotels, as they do in NSW and Queensland, after touching down from overseas. They do not, and more than 800 Victorians die needlessly because of a dumb-ass policy.
22. The first Covid case at St Basil’s Home for the Aged in Fawkner is July 9, 2020. As just one example of a failing sector under strain, it is thought to be another six days before the 100 or so residents – who mingle in the meantime – get tested.
23. Peter Fox, son of billionaire Lindsay, and his family being exempted from bans on Victorians travelling to Queensland in August, 2020 after he tells the Queensland government he drives trucks.
24. A local council installing concrete roadblocks to confound skateboarders from gathering at a Hawthorn skate park. It follows other councils’ creative leads of dumping sand or tan bark to deter the mischievous fiends.
25. Anxious families huddling outside nursing homes, where some of their parents are getting infected, dehydrated and living their final moments soiled in their own filth. The system fails them, and we still don’t know why.
26. A public servant speaks of an hour’s “equity and diversity” training for hotel quarantine staff, yet no training in the use of personal protective equipment.
27. Stories emerge of arrivals going on shopping expeditions and fraternising between rooms. Supposed sexual escapades get detailed.
28. Global Victoria, which organises aspects of the private security arrangements, applies “compassionate empathy” to the task, but forgets to apply logic or common sense.
29. Global Victoria makes an in-house video, which likens its pandemic response to a “massive inbound super trade mission”, and features chief executive Gonul Serbest explaining how “really proud” the organisation feels about its work, which includes hotel quarantine.
30. This smug ignorance symbolises the broader absence of care expressed by government ministers and their senior bureaucrats. As an inquiry later concludes, here is a “catastrophe waiting to happen”.
31. At the inquiry, headed by former judge Jennifer Coate, a succession of politicians and bureaucrats explain how they do not know or must have forgotten. No one is to blame, they collectively argue. The diabolical choice of private security is presented as a mystery in institutional osmosis.
32. In August last year, Andrews speaks of “shitty choices” after engagement party footage depicts guests making fun of Covid laws against gatherings. Yet the “shittiest” choice of all is Victoria’s hotel quarantine program.
33. Andrews tells the inquiry that Health Minister Jenny Mikakos is accountable for the failed program.
34. Former Department of Health and Human Services secretary Kym Peake says she did not brief Mikakos on aspects of the program.
35. Mikakos replies to Andrews’ suggestion that she would have been asked to resign if she had not already resigned by stating that Victorians “do not need another masterclass in political deflection from the Premier”.
36. The apology. Andrews says sorry, and says he is accountable for mistakes made in the hotel quarantine program. But he isn’t; nor is anyone else.
37. Andrews locking down 3000 residents in public housing towers in Flemington and North Melbourne without warning at 4pm on July 4, 2020.
38. Police swarming the sites, in scenes likened to an action movie bomb threat.
39. Vulnerable residents lack food, medication, and any chance for the comforts that might make their imprisonment more bearable.
40. “The rushed lockdown was not compatible with the residents’ human rights, including their right to humane treatment when deprived of liberty,” says a later report by Ombudsman Deborah Glass. “In my opinion … the action appeared to be contrary to the law.” Invited to apologise for such crude overreach, Housing Minister Richard Wynne responds that he will not apologise for “saving lives”.
41. Contact tracing systems which rely on paper and fax communications, as if the past 30 years of technological revolution has passed Victoria by. The state belatedly moves to a digitised process months after other states applied far more advanced technology.
42. Ratcheting up the rhetoric, police chief commissioner Shane Patton says in July 2020 that police may use drones in lockdown suburbs to ensure that Melburnians are abiding by stay-at-home orders.
43. A Melbourne curfew is introduced on August 2, 2020, when 671 new daily cases are reported. Weddings are banned, exercise is limited to an hour within 5km of home, and police will patrol. There is no evidence that such blanketed measures curb the spread.
44. Police, on horseback and armed with shields and batons, arrest 74 so-called Freedom protesters and issue an estimated $200,000 in fines at Queen Victoria Market. “Protesting is stupid, protesting is selfish, and protesting is dangerous,” Andrews says afterwards, in neglecting to mention that under his government’s double standards, some protests demand more punishment than others.
45. “Ultimately we’ll have to be, just as we always have been, guided by the data, the evidence, the numbers and the detailed analysis of those numbers,” Andrews says. Epidemiologist Catherine Bennett later describes the so-called road map out of lockdown, which would go 111 days from July to October, 2020, as a “sledgehammer approach … when a hammer may have been just as effective”.
46. Andrews later announces one of the main reasons for a curfew – to ease the job of police officers. Who’s serving who?
47. Restrictions to ease – but only when case numbers fall below five a day. The target is considered too low by some epidemiologists, and rightly leads to questions about the need to shield antiquated contact tracing systems.
48. Being months behind other states in introducing a universal QR code system which can routinely link cases via a database.
49. A 2020 Melbourne Cup with an official attendance of zero. A 2021 Melbourne Cup with an official attendance of 10,000.
50. Victorians collectively being advised to not hug or kiss family and friends visiting from NSW, where there are outbreaks, for Christmas 2020.
51. Absurdly short notice to return to Victoria from NSW before the border closes on Jan 1, 2021. Loved ones are forced to separate from loved ones, and queues seven hours long are reported at car checkpoints.
52. A patient in intensive care with Covid gets a call from a contact tracer – nine or more days after testing positive – to be told he has Covid.
53. This follows a claim of Premier Dan Andrews that the state’s contact tracing system is “gold standard” and that other states would seek to emulate it. The total number of states which go on follow the Victorian example? Zero.
54. Queensland Health asking people to wear a mask in the car – even if alone – because “a consistent approach keeps you safe”. How wearing a mask while alone will stave off Covid is not explained.
55. The “it’s not a race” rhetoric of the Morrison government rightly gets condemned, over and over, as international figures from April, 2021 show Australia’s rate at 2.1 vaccinations per 100 people – compared with Israel’s 115 vaccinations per 100, and behind rates in Rwanda, Bangladesh and Bolivia.
56. The “no exceptions” rule. When a poor boy drowns on school camp in Warrnambool in May, 2021, and almost no one can go to the funeral (despite AFL matches being played at the time), the state’s institutional stridency is, once again, revealed for its cruelty.
57. A few weeks later, Victoria’s chief health officer Brett Sutton ignores his own 25km travel rule to attend a Canberra awards night – which other state counterparts choose to attend online.
58. Victorians are given 12 hours to return to the state before the border closes with NSW in July, 2021. Many with compelling reasons, such as lack of proximity and/or terminally-ill loved ones, cannot meet this deadline. Of 33,000 subsequent exemption requests, Victoria’s health department approves only eight per cent. Many applications are not rejected; they simply go unassessed. Ombudsman Deborah Glass, in a later report, cites descriptors such as “inhumane”, “punitive”, “unjust outcomes” and “heartbreaking” to describe this process.
59. Another curfew is enacted in August, 2021, when there are 22 new daily cases. Lockdown is supposed to last two weeks, but is extended and will go for 78 days.
60. The evidence is, once again, put aside when the Andrews government bans playground play in August, 2021. Chief health officer Brett Sutton thought about the ban “long and hard”, he says, because playgrounds in lockdown are “one of the great escapes from home in a day”. So, he and the Andrews government ban them anyway, because naughty parents are reportedly chatting and drinking in such settings. “This spreads amongst kids and we can’t have the potential transmission sites open,” Andrews says, even though there is no evidence of virus spread – then or now – in playgrounds.
61. Police chief commissioner Shane Patton warns fines could result from police patrols of playgrounds, many of which are draped in warning tape.
62. The strident police line compels police association head Wayne Gatt to point out the obvious: “Police are now tasked with enforcing a curfew that no one has welcomed, and to prevent families from going to playgrounds that bring them joy.”
63. When the playground ban is, finally, dropped, two weeks later, limits remain. One parent, no eating or drinking. The Fun Police won’t let go.
64. To this day, no evidence has been produced to support the ban. The obvious conclusion is that there is no scientific basis for such a cruel and misplaced measure.
65. Andrews never misses a chance to scare the worried. Last August, even tennis player Nick Kyrgios is moved to protest when Andrews declares: “Sunday will be quite a nice day. At home. Otherwise it will be lots of Sundays spent in hospital. That’s the fact.”
66. Andrews berates people watching a sunset on the Mornington Peninsula in August, 2021. “There’s a bunch of people down (at) the Rye Beach last night who thought the best thing to do was to watch the sunset,” he said. “I’m sure it was a beautiful sunset. But that’s not in the spirit or in the letter of these rules.”
67. The Victorian approach is based on a single ideal – zero cases. Ten cases a day are too many. The unachievable targets serve to subject a city to the world’s longest lockdown. They explain an extreme lockdown culture of blanketed measures.
68. Victoria dithers while NSW – a comparable population – dares. Few Victorians are abiding by all the edicts by September, 2021. Rules may be rules, but many Victorians have concluded that some of the rules are petty, unfair, and not health-based.
69. Picnics are allowed, again, so long as all five (maximum) picnickers are fully vaccinated. “We can’t literally have a situation where we are going park by park, picnic by picnic,” says Andrews, as if placating an imaginary demand for police oversight for such high-risk ventures.
70. Health Minister Martin Foley inviting journalists to “take a chill pill” after NSW eases restrictions – at the time, Victoria is in its 257th day of lockdown.
71. Andrews concedes that the pursuit of zero cases is a folly (though not in these words), and that the singular goal of the past two years is ultimately unreachable. “I make two points: it can’t be much more than zero and, secondly, we are better off for having chased zero,” he says at the end of August. But are we?
72. Victoria has nationally recorded the highest rises for LifeLine and Beyond Blue calls and hospital admissions for childhood disorders. It also records the highest death toll for the bulk of the pandemic. Anxiety and depression, as well as disorders, skyrocket in part because of an ideological approach to near elimination.
73. Epidemiologist Bennett and former national deputy medical officer Nick Coatsworth speak of the “interpretation of inconclusive evidence” as a Victorian “trademark”.
74. The thinking for odd rules, such as playground bans and curfews, remains clouded. Requests for the public release of paperwork have been contested by the Andrews government in courtrooms. “Not in the public interest” goes a courtroom argument, as if the reasoning for seemingly random, unjust and unprecedented policies to restrict freedom and movement is above scrutiny.
75. After waiting a week or more for results, thousands of Victorians return an invalid PCR test in January, 2022, prompting the health department to blame “temporary backlogs”.
76. Although not perfect, Premier Daniel Andrews describes Victoria’s pandemic response as a “triumph” in December, 2021. At the time, it isn’t yet reported that former Australian chief medical officer Brendan Murphy had said Victoria was “buggering up the country”, or that he considered Victoria’s chief health officer Brett Sutton to be “the most hawkish” of the state authorities. Andrews overlooks the world’s longest lockdown, the hotel quarantine debacle and Melbourne’s internationally rare status of banning playgrounds. He goes on to say that “some people … just can’t find it in themselves to say ‘well done’.”
77. The $580m Centre for National Resilience – a purpose-built quarantine facility – closes after housing 2168 residents. Police Minister Anthony Carbines says the hub “served its purpose”, which it seems was to cost taxpayers about $267,000 per resident. Let’s say what no one else will: well done.
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