Premier, NSW needs a Plan B in the Covid war

Despite the most severe restrictions to our way of life, the Premier’s pandemic plan is failing. So what’s NSW’s Plan B, Anna Caldwell asks.

It’s time for Gladys Berejiklian to level with the people of NSW.

Saturday marks a month since we were sent into lockdown.

Despite the most severe restrictions on our way of life at any point in the pandemic, we have been utterly unable to make a dent in the problem.

Not only has Berejiklian’s approach not worked, our situation has gotten worse, culminating in 124 cases on Thursday, the worst result of the outbreak.

Premier Gladys Berejiklian.

Health Minister Brad Hazzard.

Contact tracers are swamped, testing results are delayed and workers in insecure work are worried about putting meals on the table as the economy stalls.

It is time for the Premier to present a Plan B. With the current approach not working, what’s next?

Instead the people of NSW were left in the dark at Thursday’s daily press conference, with the Premier unwilling or unable to answer this question.

She dodged it, saying she doesn’t want to delve into “hypotheticals”.

Sadly there is nothing hypothetical about the fact that this lockdown isn’t working in the way we hoped.

Berejiklian, though, hastily shifted the goal posts, pivoting to trumpeting her success in protecting us from thousands of cases and the scenes of Delta-inflicted horror in places like India.

NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian seemingly has no plan B to curb the lockdown which is not working to combat the Delta outbreaks of Covid. Art: Terry Pontikos

Yes, this is a victory. It is certainly true the lockdown has kept case numbers from exponentially exploding. But this is not the victory we were targeting.

It’s a new metric because, frankly, our expectations were much higher.

We expected the lockdown to work. We expected our way of life would be restored within weeks.

Instead of moving the goal posts, the NSW government must admit that what we are doing isn’t working, throw out the rule book and take the next steps.

This should include harder work on vaccination rates.

Remember, of the entire fully-salaried NSW parliament, there is just a handful of ministers and MPs working round the clock. The rest are not doing too much work at all.

Every single one of them should be tasked with assisting their community with vaccination rates — pushing their over 60s to have AstraZeneca and encourage others to talk to the GP.

More creativity should be shown at the government level too — send people door-to-door with vaccines if you have to. Offer drive through vaccines at testing clinics. Whatever it takes.

The Premier is still stoking hope that the restrictions she announced last weekend — shutting down construction and closing retail — will have an impact.

It’s important to note, she’s shifted those goal posts too.

When Berejiklian announced the changes last Saturday, she said the impact would be seen “in five to seven days”.

On Thursday she said we’d know by “at least the weekend or early next week”.

So if we give the Premier’s timeline some grace, and there’s no improvement by next week, what next?

Asked on Thursday what her plan B was in these circumstances, Berejiklian replied: “I never, ever want to delve into the hypothetical because it’s important for us to provide as much information as we have to the community.”

This answer is not good enough.

There are effectively three options.

We can tighten restrictions further and truly throw everything at this.

We can ease restrictions and accept cases will climb to an out-of-control scenario.

Or, we continue on our current trajectory, plodding along.

In any of these scenarios, the Premier needs to front up and admit to the public that this lockdown could last well into late spring or even summer when vaccine rates have an impact.

After a pathetically soft start to the lockdown four weeks ago — remember the Premier could not even bring herself to use the word “lockdown” — there is still room to go harder.

Berejiklian could demand masks outdoors, which would have little effect on transmission but a dramatic effect on mindset and people movement.

To this end, she could lessen the distance we can travel from home. In SA you are only allowed 2.5km from your home, in Victoria it’s 5km and in NSW it’s 10km.

She could also enforce a curfew like Victoria did last year, or set exercise time limits.

No one, including me, wants liberties restrained even further. But if the alternative is locking down until summer, more would be willing to try a last ditch, no-holds-barred effort.

The alternative approach is that we accept Delta defeat.

There are forces inside government pushing to accept the fact that we cannot control the virus and should slowly taper off restrictions as we accept climbing cases.

If there is no impact by next week of the current restrictions they will push harder for us to accept defeat.

The Premier has always said there is no safe level of Delta in the community and so to accept this would be an almighty backflip on her part.

If we accept continued daily case numbers at their current rate, or ease restrictions and allow cases to climb, we need to tell citizens NSW will be cut off from the rest of Australia until vaccination rates reach their target because this is the reality.

We can only wonder if we had locked down earlier whether we would now be free of the problem.

And if the government had instituted tougher restrictions four weeks ago, could we have avoided this long lockdown?

Hindsight is a marvellous thing and serves little purpose now except for the lessons it teaches us. The best of which is that we should have done more, sooner.