Anna Caldwell: NSW a victim of premature pride in Covid handling

The people of NSW were like frogs in boiling water, congratulating our handling of Covid while the delta mutation spread, writes Anna Caldwell.

Pride has come before a fall for NSW. The state government was so confident with its impeccable handling of the pandemic — our ability to live with the virus — that it pushed the boundaries on the Delta variant.

With the benefit of hindsight, most of us in NSW were too enamoured with our own success as the best in the world at tracking, tracing and juggling life with the virus.

We were like frogs in boiling water as the highly contagious genetic Delta mutation spread, thinking we could contain it despite no other country managing to do just that.

Premier Gladys Berejiklian says the Delta variants means NSW cannot just open up and live with the virus. Picture: Getty Images

The crisis unfolding for Sydney, and indeed the whole of Australia as its biggest economy is suffocated by a lockdown that risks stretching well beyond what we’ve been told, is a true lesson in the perils of hubris.

Even Dominic Perrottet, who now has his hand out to the federal government for help, declared in March that JobKeeper should end and that states should stop asking others to subsidise their own bad management of the virus.

“It’s Queensland, you know it’s beautiful one day, subsidised by NSW the next, or the Commonwealth, and this is the challenge that we’re going to have going forward. The decisions of the day that state governments make have significant economic ­impacts on their people,” he said a year ago.

Gladys Berejiklian, too, scoffed when Queensland wanted more JobKeeper for its tourism industry, saying Annastacia Palaszczuk’s own policy failings were to blame.

Handing them sky-high approval ratings, voters in NSW also believed we were in the lucky state and we had our virus management sorted.

But now, comprehensive failings at both levels of government have put NSW in the grips of a full-blown Covid crisis.

chief health officer Kerry Chant wants to see zero Delta cases in the community before the lockdown is lifted. Picture: Getty Images

The Commonwealth has failed us with a catastrophic vaccine rollout. The NSW government failed us with inadequate health orders that ­allowed airport drivers to flit about unvaccinated, unmasked and untested.

Federal and state governments have ushered in this perfect storm, and our deeply vulnerable communities in southwest Sydney find themselves in its eye.

On Friday, fearful residents will wake up to a huge police presence.

Across Sydney, hundreds of thousands of casual workers have lost shifts and jobs.

Business owners are confronting the prospect they may not come out the other end of the lockdown.

When the government kept boasting that it knew how to manage the virus, no one imagined this is what that looks like.

Through it all, the people of NSW have done what has been asked of them — this crisis is not of their ­making.

After an outcry for days over a lack of government financial support in a government-mandated lockdown, the PM moved yesterday to alleviate some of the problems.

Removing the means testing for access to $325 and $500 payments and finding 300,000 more vaccines for Sydney was a step in the right ­direction.

The NSW government is also ­examining more support for busin­esses including rent relief.

But it is likely none of this will go far enough.

Warren’s view of the vaccine rollout.

There is a strong possibility lockdown will not end on July 16 as ­promised.

chief health officer Kerry Chant wants to see zero Delta cases in the community before freedom is ­restored.

She is advising the government that even a handful of Delta cases in the community will be very difficult to contain.

For a state that always prided itself on managing Covid in the community, that will be a hard pill to swallow.

Pressure will mount when we do start to see cases drop, and the decisions about what threshold is manageable will be critical.

Berejiklian, in some of her strongest, clearest messaging in days, unequivocally rejected a view among some that we should just open up and live with the virus.

While we could do that in the past, she says Delta simply won’t allow it.

“This has been demonstrated by every other place in the world and we can’t pretend we’re different in NSW or Australia. You can’t live with the Delta variant unless you have a ­certain proportion of the population vaccinated,” she said.

She said in previous outbreaks we “managed not to go into lockdown because we had the resources, the ­capacity and the transmissibility rates to deal with it”.

Lockdowns are horrible.

They have a far greater social ­impact than the virus has been able to unleash thus far in Australian case numbers.

But we all have to have hard conversations and ask ourselves: what are we willing to accept?

Will we accept skyrocketing hospitalisations and death tolls if we go the way of other nations, with no vaccine safety net?

Berejiklian knows the answer to that is a firm no.

We are, in this sense, a victim of our own success. A sudden humanitarian crisis now will be seen as a ­failure of governance, not an ­unavoidable pitfall.

At the heart of this is the vaccine rollout failure.

Any illusion that this is not a race has well and truly been dispelled.

There is no room for any more mistakes in the vaccination programs.

The government had better be ­ensuring that when supplies increase they have the infrastructure to get needles in arms.

Because Sydney has unequivocally shown that the idea any of us can ­outsmart the virus is nothing more than self delusion.