Steve Price: Rule-abiding folk are confused by the Premier’s all then nothing Covid approach

After catching Covid, triple-vaxxed Steve Price questions the merit of a fourth jab and wonders how we went from lockdowns to a packed MCG.

The Anzac Day match at the MCG was full of maskless fans, standing shoulder-to-shoulder, and a far cry from the lockdowns of last year. Picture: Michael Klein

Covid finally got me.

After two vaccinations and a booster, and after being locked up like a prisoner six times and wearing masks and facing bans from office work and abiding by curfews, it hit.

An embrace on the side of a road at Red Hill on the Mornington Peninsula was almost certainly my ground zero.

Easter was probably the spreader and after more than two years and one month worth of boasting it wouldn’t catch me out … I got it.

But I’m one of the lucky ones. The very lucky ones. Covid felt to me like many had described — little more than a bad head cold and certainly nothing like the one and only time I’ve had influenza.

If not for a positive test – although at first indication the RAT line was so faint, I couldn’t even see it and dismissed it — I would have put it down to a cold.

I feel blessed. Locals I have spoken to have done it much tougher. A fit former Olympian in his 80s with no comorbidity ended up in ICU on a ventilator.

A former radio broadcaster friend still has a vicious chest cough months after his Covid run in.

Melbourne’s Royal Exhibition Building vax hub. Picture: Jason Edwards

Around Australia every day people are still dying either from or with Covid and nobody should treat lightly the idea of long Covid.

I do personally wonder though was it worth all the disruptions forced upon Australians and Victorians for what, for me, amounted to a bad cold?

A year ago next week — May 4, 2021 — I turned up at the Rosebud skin clinic that had been co-opted by the federal government and turned into a vaccination centre. Remember them?

Masked and queuing outside, as only four at a time could attend, I had AstraZeneca injected into my left arm. Aged over 65 I was at the front of the queue.

It was a time last year of some freedom. There had been a five-day lockdown in February and by May 27, worn out and lockdown weary, cases spiked again for a 14-day shutdown with more curfews and pain.

Little did we know there were to be two more, with lockdown five lasting 12 days ending on July 27. Nine days later nobody could believe it – and I still don’t – it happened again and at 8pm on August 5 Melbourne shut down for a world-record sixth time. It lasted a torturous 78 days through August, September and October.

We were all broken. Many still are and the financial and mental scars of how this was handled will be felt for decades to come.

What angers people now is those lockdowns were supposedly based on the best medical advice and were driven by numbers threatening to overwhelm the health system.

That never happened and that same health system is right now today under as much stress and pressure as it ever was during Covid because of a generational lack of funding and a health workforce exhausted, underpaid and in many cases off work because of regulations.

With Victoria recently scrapping most of its remaining Covid rules, there are no more long testing queues in Melbourne’s CBD. Picture: David Crosling

When you look back at the case numbers justified to lock people up six times over two years, and compare that with case numbers today, you understand we were all the victims of a system that panicked.

For context, last Wednesday, Victoria had 10,734 new cases and 13 deaths.

Lockdown six last year was introduced off the back of eight new cases only.

Having an ambition to achieve and maintain zero Covid cases — something achieved nowhere in the world and a policy still causing human suffering in China — was just boneheaded and arrogant.

It was, and remains, a public policy failure so badly managed that it is staggering anyone that had anything to do with it still has a job.

Supporters of the central characters in this – chief health officer Brett Sutton and Premier Daniel Andrews – will tell you the operation saved many lives.

A lot of people also died.

The zero-Covid obsession lasted through 2020 and 2021, so what about now? Cases are running at somewhere between 7000 and 10,000 a day although under reporting, I’d suggest, would put that figure at three times higher.

People die every day and go to hospital and ICU every day, and do we see a daily media conference or a curfew or a lockdown? No we don’t.

We are told that’s because we have high levels of vaccination but as a triple vaxxed over 65- year-old I still caught it.

Victoria’s chief health officer Professor Brett Sutton says Victoria’s harsh lockdowns saved lives. Picture: Ian Currie

I was due last week to have my second booster. I only worked that out when I decided to write about my vaccination history and then realised I was due. I’m not sure now why I’d bother.

Nobody wants to go back to the dark days of 2020 and 2021 but rule following Australians like me are confused. Take last Saturday and Sunday at the MCG.

Anzac weekend crowds (unless by personal choice) all maskless and shoulder-to-shoulder, without any requirement for anyone inside, players and clubs officials aside, needing to prove vaccination, even though Covid is still rampant.

In the same week, state teachers not prepared to have a Covid booster shot are shown the door and lose their jobs.

I guess that proves the inconsistent, nonsensical divide and regulations we have lived with for two-and-a-half years are still as dumb as ever.

The Anzac Day match between the Bombers and Magpies at the MCG was a free-for-all when it came to Covid rules. Picture: Mark Stewart.

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Originally published as Steve Price: Rule-abiding folk are confused by the Premier’s all then nothing Covid approach