Why is every Sydney Covid outbreak just before school holidays?
New restrictions have been slapped on the movements of residents of Greater Sydney today. Why does this keep happening before the holidays? And why is everyone learning to live with the virus except us?
Opinion
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Many years ago I lived in an old inner city house where the plumbing — and apologies for what comes next — would occasionally decide to cease all relations with the sewer main and flood the back courtyard.
This would happen without any warning, rhyme, or reason. It was a bit like the Overlook Hotel in The Shining, except instead of a torrent of blood down the hallways … well, you get the idea.
About the only thing that could be relied upon was that it would always, without fail, happen at the least convenient time.
Like, one year, at 10am Christmas morning, with a ham glazing in the oven and 15 people due for lunch.
It’s a bit like that with Covid: It seems as if every time Sydney is looking forward to something, be it Christmas or school holiday, the goddamn virus rises up again like so much backyard muck to ruin our good time.
Remember last year? School holidays were due to kick off on July 6.
Like clockwork, just days before, the country saw a spike in cases, hospital admissions, restrictions, and of course cancellations and disappointment.
Then there was Christmas, which saw the Northern Beaches cut off from Sydney (not, as more than a few locals joked, that you could tell) and shopkeepers’ hopes of a semi-normal season crushed.
And now, just as students are getting ready for a well-earned break from their climate change poster competitions, the bloody virus rears its head again.
Which is doubly unfair on the parents. Not only can they not drive the tribe up to Queensland, given the whole Westfields situation, they can’t even send the kids to the mall.
This uncanny sense of timing is so suspicious it ought to be added to every other piece of evidence that the thing was cooked up in a bat-vat in that Wuhan lab.
I kid, of course, but perhaps there is a bright side — though my friend who texted me as Annastacia Palaszczuk was going through her “Queensland beaches are for Queensland people, and not you filthy Sydneysiders” routine to say holidays are the only thing getting parents and kids through these days might disagree.
And it is this.
How good would it be if parents and their children spent a bit of time checking out how things are going not just with coronavirus but also with peoples’ attitudes to it around the world?
While in Australia we bring the hammer down over a handful of cases — and don’t even give the vaccinated an exemption — other places are going in the other direction.
In California, which suffered under a months-long stay at home order, authorities have removed almost all restrictions — even though they’re seeing an average 895 cases per day.
Importantly, that number has dropped almost 15 per cent in the last fortnight as nearly 60 per cent of Californians have had at least one jab — suggesting that yes, those vaccines do work.
Across the US, fully vaccinated people have been told by the Centres for Disease Control that they can resume all activities without a mask, unlike in NSW, where the jabbed are not even allowed to stand up with a beer at the pub.
From South Korea (400 cases a day) to Canada (700-800 a day), fully vaccinated citizens can go back and forth across the border.
It doesn’t have to be a dreary stats project either.
Hit the right hashtags on Instagram and they’ll see Americans holidaying in Mexico, Italian resorts opening to vaccinated travellers, and a world crawling out from under its shell.
The start of a potential spike in Covid cases and restrictions may seem like an odd time to pine for the freedoms of countries that are, by the numbers, doing it a lot worse.
But getting some perspective may also help change our mindset away from the fool’s errand of “zero Covid” and the game of border bingo that goes along with it, and instead point the direction of how to truly live with this thing – rather than in terror of it.
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