Tim Blair: The pizza ‘rona which made everyone take leave of their senses

A visitor from Spain last week blamed pizza for his coronavirus diagnosis, which turned out not to be true — but his claim still shut down South Australia for days, writes Tim Blair.

Here’s to the pizza shop worker who last week managed to shut down an entire Australian state.

His case is a perfect ­illustration of how prone many governments and institutions are to taking fright as a first resort.

It all began when the unnamed 36-year-old Spanish gentleman, here on a temporary working visa, told COVID-19 investigators he’d caught the virus after buying a pizza in the Adelaide suburb of Woodville.

This turned out not to be true. The man was actually working at the pizza shop, and also at a quarantine ­facility.

The Woodville Pizza Bar, which has been the centre of South Australia’s COVID lockdown. Picture: Matt Turner

He’d evidently caught the virus in the usual manner — through contact with someone infected.

But before anyone sensible was able to review the validity of coronavirus transmission through mozzarella miasma and pepperoni vectors, South Australian Liberal Premier Steven Marshall announced a statewide six-day lockdown.

“This is a very fast-moving situation,” Marshall told Adelaide radio.

“What we know is that time is of the essence and you don’t have time to deliberate … we decided to go hard and go early.”

They sure did. I’m not aware of the precise delivery area serviced by the Woodville Pizza Bar, but everyone in SA from Oodnadatta to Naracoorte was judged to be instantly at risk of capricciosa-borne COVID.

Just about every business, pizza-­related or otherwise, was ordered to close its doors.

“The elements of this are quite frightening,” Marshall continued, speaking of the “particularly sneaky strain” his experts had detected.

“It’s quite different than anything we’ve seen before.”

South Australian Premier Steven Marshall made some wild statements about the outbreak. Picture: Emma Brasier

Someone less inclined to panic might have dwelt a little longer on that final observation.

What are the odds, do you think, that South Australia of all places would suddenly give rise to a version of the coronavirus that uses pizza as a carriage system?

After all, the whole state had by yesterday recorded a total of only 554 infections and just four COVID deaths. Police found three times as many dead folk in an old Snowtown bank vault back in 1999.

Adelaide just kept rolling along following that grisly episode. Nobody demanded an SA-wide search of disused financial facilities and the barrels therein.

Not that you’d really want to. Lifting even a single South Australian lid is a potential gateway to years of ­therapy.

The state’s chief health officer, Professor Nicola Spurrier, also talked up the freakish nature of SA’s pizzavirus and its “very, very short incubation period”.

“When somebody gets exposed, it is taking 24 hours or even less for that person to become infectious to others and the other characteristic of the cases we have seen so far is they have had minimal symptoms,” Spurrier said.

South Australian Chief Public Health Officer Nicola Spurrier also made outlandish claims. Picture: Kelly Barnes/Getty Images

Minimal symptoms, you say? Well, let’s wipe a few hundred more millions off the SA economy, then.

But it soon emerged the pizza man from Spain had made up his little ­infection story.

“To say that I am fuming about the actions of this individual is an absolute understatement,” Marshall raged on Friday following this revelation.

“His actions have affected ­businesses, individuals, family groups and is completely and utterly ­unacceptable.”

Hang on a second, Mr Premier.

Unless we’ve been reading the South Australian Constitution all wrong, Spanish pizza workers don’t have a great deal of authority when it comes to enforcing business and ­social lockdowns.

Nor is there anything in that document declaring all announcements by Spanish visitors to be primary legislative material, otherwise every temporary-visa Tonio, Diago and Hernandez would be running the place.

South Australian authorities bit off more than they could chew in a knee-jerk lockdown of the whole state. Picture: Terry Pontikos.

And probably doing a damn better job of it.

Governments move with astonishing speed when they decide to do something wrong. Correcting an error, however, is a rather more time-consuming process.

Although the South Australian Coalition government knew on Friday the pizza crisis had never been a crisis — chief health officer Spurrier abruptly noted there was nothing “particularly special” about the latest virus diagnoses — lockdowns remained in place until midnight Saturday.

One small consolation for some SA residents: a complete lockdown in, say, Innamincka isn’t likely to be much different from a usual day.

And a big consolation for NSW: despite her government’s many flaws — certain members respond to climate change in the same way SA does to erroneous coronavirus claims — Premier Gladys Berejiklian is no Steven Marshall.

“In contrast to Berejiklian’s measured, proportionate and transparent management of COVID-19 outbreaks,” The Australian’s Janet Albrechtsen wrote on the weekend, “the SA Premier’s response to this outbreak has been both confused and feverish.”

Premier Gladys Berejiklian has her faults but she handled COVID better than Steven Marshall. Picture: Lisa Maree Williams/Getty Images

In other words, he exhibited far more troubling symptoms than anyone who caught the pizza-’rona.

And there’s no Pfizer vaccine on the horizon for political panty-­bunching.

Meanwhile, wily individuals keep finding creative means of working around COVID restrictions.

Two Sydney kids planned to gay-marry earlier this month so their Year 12 formal could be reclassified as a wedding, therefore allowing 150 guests rather than just 30 or so.

Good on them, even though the plan was halted by killjoy parents. Just as laudable was a successful strategy carried out by four mates in ­Ireland.

The group purchased cheap $16 flights out of Dublin but never boarded any jets. Instead, they simply used their tickets as entry fees to the airport’s main bar.

All restaurants and bars in Dublin Airport, you see, are exempt from coronavirus restrictions that have otherwise shut down the city’s pubs.

You can even get a pizza there.