James Campbell: Victorians fearing COVID circus starting all over again

Victorians facing fresh COVID restrictions can only wonder why Daniel Andrews didn’t shut the border sooner, writes James Campbell.

You can’t say 2020 isn’t going down swinging! With a few hours to go of the year we can’t wait to forget, the restrictions are back.

You can be overwhelmed with gloom.

You can be overwhelmed with fear that the whole circus is about to start again: the daily press conferences in the North Face jacket, the sycophantic questions from journalists who should have #istandwithdan tattooed on their backsides, the dread feeling that we at are the mercy of people who have no idea what they are doing.

But the one thing you cannot be is surprised.

Anyone who has been stuck in Victoria this year knew the public health authorities would react to the first sign of an outbreak by dropping the hammer.

We should be grateful the restrictions are thus far so mild. It’s a miracle Victorians are being allowed to have anyone over at all. Compulsory masks?

Loathed by much of the population, but hardly surprising: half of inner-city Melbourne has never stopped wearing them.

The problem is we know in our bones it isn’t going to stop here. As someone quickly pointed out to me on Thursday morning, 9am-11am at Fountain Gate on Boxing Day involves a level of physical intimacy with strangers on a par with peak hour trains in Tokyo, going on to add “of course they had to go and complete the holy trinity of Kmart, Big W and Target while they were there.”

Half of inner-city Melbourne has never stopped wearing maks. Picture: NCA NewsWire

Between that lot and the Catholic Church in Doveton and the Black Rock Thai, it feels like deja vu all of again. In some ways we’re in better shape than we were in July, some ways worse.

Better in that it’s summer and as we can see from our own experience and the disaster currently unfolding in the northern hemisphere, the virus spreads better in weather that drives people indoors.

Better too, in that we’ve been reassured the contact tracing that the Andrews Government reassured us back in April was tremendous, is apparently even more tremendous today.

One way or the other we’ll soon know for sure.

Hearing the acting premier Jacinta Allan talking up all the work going on checking on the close contacts of the infected, it is easy to dream that this time it will all be different.

Seeing a warning on the DHHS website about Fountain Gate Lacoste, when as a colleague pointed out, there is no such outlet, makes it less so.

How are we in worse shape?

Obviously from the everyone-mixing-together-with-their-guards-down point of view this couldn’t have happened at a worse time of year, as is the fact that this is a week when most of us usually have at least one occasion to drive a long distance to see family and friends, even if we haven’t actually relocated to the beach.

But we are also behind the eight-ball today in a way we weren’t in July, because things are a lot less restricted now than they were then. Although we tend to think of the year as being divided into Lockdown 1 and Lockdown 2, in reality Lockdown 1 never really ended.

On June 22, restaurants, pubs and cafes were meant to go back to 50 customers, with up to 20 people in one group, at the same as cinemas, gyms, pools and communal facilities in camp grounds reopened.

None of it happened because of the second wave.

Today all those restrictions are gone and until New Year’s Eve the rules on who could come to your house were more liberal too.

We might be lucky. It might be we’ve caught it in time, this time. But we need to understand that in many ways conditions are better for a rapid spread than they were in July.

Given the Government has always known this as well as that things are much laxer in Sydney – as anyone who has been there in the past month could tell you – the question has to be asked, why has it taken so long to shut the border with NSW?

Eleven days ago the Premier warned it would take “significant additional action to slow the spread of the virus in NSW”.

He was right. It begs the question why he didn’t shut the border sooner. You can argue the merits or otherwise of Victoria’s hard-lockdown strategy to eliminate the virus.

But what is beyond argument is that you are going to run an elimination strategy – given that we have learned through bitter experience how hard that is – you had better bloody well keep it eliminated, especially, as we have also learned through bitter experience, this is a public health team with a hair trigger.

Surely shutting the borders was an easier call than having to shut down the whole state?

Let’s just pray we are lucky.

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@J_C_Campbell

Originally published as James Campbell: Victorians fearing COVID circus starting all over again