Melbourne bypasses Argentina to have world’s longest lockdown

It was once home to one of the world’s most vibrant cities. Now, the country that Melbourne has overtaken for the longest lockdown has changed forever.

The “Paris of South America” may never bounce back from closing its economy to the world, switching off the lights on its culture, and isolating Porteños from family and friends.

Before Melbourne claimed the crown, Buenos Aires held the dubious honour of being holed up in the world’s longest Covid lockdown.

Its 234 consecutive day record will be shattered by 22 days if Melbourne’s lockdown ends as planned on October 26. But even if restrictions are lifted, the fallout across the Pacific Ocean warns the cure could leave deeper scars on the city than the disease itself.

Argentina shut down quickly, strictly, and repeatedly. What started as a two-week mandatory lockdown on March 20 with wide public support lingered long enough to become deeply mistrusted as excessive government overreach.

Curfews were imposed. Neighbours were encouraged to betray neighbours. Borders were closed. Tens of thousands of Argentinians were stranded overseas with no way home.

Justin Vallejo and his dad, John Vallejo, 73, of Sydney, during a visit to Buenos Aires in January 2018. Picture: Supplied

More than a dozen rolling lockdown extensions were finally lifted on November 8 as summer approached almost eight months later. After a two-month respite, restrictions were reinstated on January 11, 2021, and continued on and off until finally being eased after the government was hammered in September elections.

“There were no schools, no universities, shops and stores were all closed. Public transportation was limited, construction was limited, the airport was completely closed, there were no flights, you couldn’t take buses to the interior of the country, there were no ships going out of the port. Everything was blocked,” said Manu Acevedo, a 31-year-old architect laid off in early 2020.

Architect Manuel Acevado, 31, was unable to return to work after lockdowns as construction sites were closed and restrictions were placed on buying materials.

“And when people started moving, there was nowhere to go. Everything was closed. For me as an architect, it was very difficult to go back to work because people could not work. We were not allowed to go back to the construction sites or even to buy materials.”

Economic and social crises ensued.

Buenos Aires saw its economy crushed by 9.2 per cent in 2020. In the city’s downtown galleria alone, more than half its commercial stores went out of business along the famous Florida Street. Thousands of jobs were lost.

University of Buenos Aires researchers found that almost half the population felt “great anxiety”, while more than a third had developed depression. Alcohol and drug use surged, but health took a backseat to fears of financial ruin, poverty, and destitution. A government handout of 10,000 pesos ($140) did little to help.

Carmen Vergara, 34, lost her job as an industrial designer in December 2020. Crammed into a two-bedroom apartment in Palermo, she and her partner, a musician and DJ, started drinking heavily. Malbec makes that easy in Argentina.

“At one moment we were drinking maybe one bottle of wine every day, and then weekends more,” she said.

Carmen Vergara, 34 (right) with her partner and friends breaking lockdown restrictions. Ms Vegara and her boyfriend, a musician and DJ, resorted to heavy drinking during the pandemic.

“Health-wise was a little bit not good. When I tried to do workouts at my house then I felt more in jail. Like a little bit suffocating.”

The hardest part, by far, was her fear of police.

The couple would leave the house with fake shopping bags in case stopped or questioned, they adopted a dog to take on walks, and made less-than-genuine excuses about caring for elderly family to obtain official “permits” needed to travel.

“I hated having to go out, just walking around the block and seeing the police. Because I’m breaking the rules, but my brain and my body needs to go out because I’m losing my mind,” Ms Vergara said.

Commuters walk trough ticket machines, amid a rise in cases of the coronavirus disease in Buenos Aires, Argentina, on May 22, 2021. Picture: Getty

As lockdowns dragged on, individual police began following their humanity ahead of their orders. They often looked the other way as people exercised outdoors or broke curfews, which oscillated between 6pm, 8pm, 1am and 2am. Clandestine gatherings and parties were publicly denounced but often continued in private unchecked.

Protests emerged throughout as the lockdown dragged on. Soon after restrictions began to ease in November, a large-scale clash with police broke out at the open casket viewing of Argentina’s late World Cup legend Diego Maradona.

Singing and chanting football fans hurled rocks and bottles as police fired rubber bullets and tear gas in response.

Mistrust of government mandates had boiled over amid reports of illicit visits to the Casa Rosada presidential palace, including a trainer for the president’s dog and a hairdresser for the first lady.

Aerial view of people protesting against Argentine President Alberto Fernandez in Buenos Aires. Picture: Getty

President Alberto Fernández apologised after photos emerged of a dozen, maskless guests at the indoor birthday party of wife Fabiola Yañez in July 2020; breaking his own lockdown rules as the rest of the city remained in solitary confinement.

In Argentina, half of the population works in “informal employment” with no benefits or redundancy packages to soften the blow. They’re the domestic housemaids, street recyclers, and construction workers. If they don’t work, they don’t get paid.

While parents worried about their next paycheck, a survey found the most pronounced effects of the lockdown was on their children. Seven in 10 kids reported symptoms of depression and loneliness.

Freelance sports writer Daniel Edwards, 34, had a seven-month-old son due to start daycare when the pandemic hit. Schools shut down early and hard. And when they did reopen, it was just as school holidays arrived. More than a year later, Mr Edward’s son, Nahuel, finally began nursery at 18-months-old.

Daniel Edwards, 34, with his son Nahuel, aged 2. Nahuel was 7-months-old and about to start daycare when the pandemic hit last year. He won't meet much of his family until the country reopens.

“It was difficult for him after so long locked up not seeing our friends, not seeing family, it was difficult in terms of getting him ready for socialisation, but he’s bounced back from it. We were lucky he wasn’t a couple of years older because I can’t imagine how hard that would have been,” Mr Edwards said.

While kids are resilient, the hardest part for parents was the isolation from family. Nahuel’s grandparents live in Tucuman, about 1200km north near the borders of Chile and Bolivia, and in England, restricted from travelling to Argentina.

Much of the family won’t meet Mr Edward’s son, who is now two years old, until Argentina reopens its borders to the world, scheduled for November as the country is poised to pass a vaccination rate of 50 per cent.

A view of a cemetery of Covid-19 victims as Covid-19 cases increase in the country in Buenos Aires, Argentina on June 3, 2021. Picture: Getty

After a slow and controversial start, Argentina’s vaccination program is now considered one of the country’s few Covid successes. About 51.2 million doses have been delivered, enough to fully vaccinate 21.6 million people, or about 48.1 per cent of the population.

The rollout began with 300,000 doses of Russia’s Sputnik V arriving on Christmas Eve, 2020. They were scheduled to go to health workers first, but the country’s Health Minister Gines Gonzalez Garcia was forced to resign after insiders used their connections to skip the line.

Not fussy on which vaccine to offer, the country contacted every provider and placed early orders for China’s Sinopharm, and the Oxford-developed AstraZeneca jab.

An elderly patient wearing mask and gloves, allegedly infected with coronavirus, is taken from a nursing home to an ambulance of the Emergency Medical Care Service (SAME) in the Belgrano neighbourhood of Buenos Aires on April 21, 2020. Picture: AFP

Amid concerns that countries wouldn’t recognise Russia’s Sputnik V as a vaccine that would allow travel, many Porteños took “vaccine vacations” to Miami for unrestricted sun, shopping, and a jab of the single-dose Johnson & Johnson vaccine.

The second dose of Sputnik V was eventually replaced by Moderna. The company announced in September the mRNA vaccine would be partly manufactured in Argentina, demonstrating the country’s role as a science and technology centre in Latin America.

After getting hit hard, Argentina’s Covid infections and deaths have fallen steadily as the infected recovered with natural immunity and vaccinations increased. The country had a total of 5.25 million cases and 115,000 deaths. In the city of Bueno Aires itself, 865,000 contracted Covid and more than 16,000 died.

Lock-down restrictions have started lifting but Buenos Aires may never be the same for Mr Acevedo, Ms Vergara and Mr Edwards.

“We are more isolated from the world, lots of airlines stopped going to Argentina … international companies are leaving the country,” he said. “The very, very long lockdown was terrible for everyone. It was terrible and right now in Argentina there is a huge economic crisis, a lot of inflation, of course, it has a lot to do with the lockdown, but also it has to do with the basis of Argentina.”

A worker of a supermarket pushes a trolley with a delivery for a client at Villa Pueyrredon neighbourhood on March 24, 2020 in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Picture: Getty

For Ms Vergara, who lives in the trendy part of the town where restaurants once overflowed and clubs once raged until dawn. She’s leaving the city centre for more space, more greenery, and more freedom.

“What used to be super interesting of being in Buenos Aires, the museums and everything, it’s not happening, or it’s happening, and you have to have a reservation in available hours,” she said.

“Buenos Aires before was a little bit more improvised, like you went out and thought ‘oh this is amazing, let’s go here, let’s go there’, so I think that to be a little more structured and planned, Buenos Aires is not that fun.”

Mr Edwards is waiting for the next round of restrictions to be lifted in the first weekend of October as the government removes mandates on masks and capacities at restaurants, bars, and shops.

“We’re going to be able to go back to football games, which I’m absolutely delighted about. I’m very much looking forward to that … you don’t want to jinx it but it’s the beginning of the end of this quarantine and trying to get back to a normal life,” he said.

“It’s a case of trying to remember what normal life is like, because it’s been so long and this staying at home, doing everything from home became so normal.”

“You’ll have people who won’t struggle with it at all and are already planning their next Asado (barbecue), planning their night out, going back to the nightclubs, but probably for the majority it’s going to be a process mending those broken bonds and working out where you stand after this exceptional, very, very strange 18 months.”

Justin Vallejo lived and worked in Buenos Aires from 2017 to 2019 in the neighbourhood of Palermo Soho, around the corner from the city’s most famous steak houses and down the street from the bars and nightclubs of nearby Palermo Hollywood. In the years before the pandemic, he explored the city’s museums and Parisian architecture by day, and drank Fernet at Asados by night.

Originally published as Melbourne bypasses Argentina to have world’s longest lockdown