Patrick Carlyon: NSW Covid response beset by torpor and denial

If Victoria had applied Sydney’s outbreak settings after NSW removalists brought Covid to town, we would be awash in virus instead of exiting lockdown.

The New South Wales government keeps saying there is no “playbook” to a Covid-19 outbreak response.

Yet there is a “playbook”.
It makes no allowance for entitlement or denial. It’s called Victoria.

If Victoria had applied Sydney’s outbreak settings after three Sydney removalists brought Covid to town, the state would be awash in virus right now.

People would have caught it at work. They’d have spread it at Sunday family lunches. Victoria would be appealing to the Bank of Morrison and, unlike Sydney, probably receiving an unhelpful reception.

Down here, thankfully, we learned lessons from the mishaps of 2020. The Andrews government was rightly held to account for draconian measures that played like a kind of chemotherapy response to public health: stem the bad at the cost of the good.

Sydney hasn’t endured those privations. There appears to be little appetite for restrictions which were applied here with success in recent weeks.

The Sydney response has been beset by torpor and wrapped in denial. Picture: Getty Images

New NSW directives sound odd for their belatedness. The question of going to work? The ins and outs of wearing face masks?

The Sydney response has been beset by torpor and wrapped in denial. The comparisons presented there are not with Victoria, where cases dwindle, but with hypotheticals.

This could have been worse, far worse, goes the official mantra. No one in charge seems keen to point out that it might have been far better, too.

Here, a few weeks ago, we faced the onset of super spreaders. Innocent of intent, the men went about ordinary things and shared the virus with dozens.

The starting points – and the extrapolations – seemed grim.

The super spreaders went to the footy and the rugby, restaurants and pubs. Teachers both, they went to work and spread the virus through schools before testing positive.

The response was swift. It didn’t discriminate.

Anyone exposed to the virus was shut in their homes, with their often hapless families, and told to stay there for two weeks.

As one of those people, this sentence felt unnecessarily cruel for the countless hours of waiting on phones and the receiving of conflicting advice.

Daily “shoutouts” from officialdom tended to miff more than mollify.

The arrival of the army at the front door – as happened yesterday to a family which had tested negative after two weeks and was within hours of “release” – is an overkill that lodges in the darker parts of the memory.

People walk maskless along the foreshore at Bondi Beach in Sydney despite the Delta outbreak. Picture: Bianca De Marchi

Yet the Victorian playbook worked. There was no magic salve. Cases of infectious people in the community did not balloon because those at risk had been withdrawn from the community.

There was an accumulated wisdom in the approach, largely brought about by the tribulations of previous errors.

On Thursday, Sydney recorded 239 new cases, of which 70 were infectious in the community.

It would be worse before it got better, Premier Gladys Berejiklian warned, in introducing selective measures.

Under “harsh new rules”, as they were dubbed, people in some Sydney suburbs have to wear face masks outside – as all Melburnians continue to, indefinitely, after lockdown five. Police presence and powers would be increased.

Such measures would have helped if they were applied last month, when Berejiklian spoke of “green shoots”.

Instead of rules, Berejiklian fixated on slow vaccination rates. Hers has been a kind of daily lament in “what if?”

The vaccinations issue might be applied another way to the NSW spin.

Yes, the Australian rollout has been a scandal of bureaucratic ineptitude. But it has at least spared NSW the worst of Victoria’s horrors from last year.

The virus has not seeped into NSW aged care, as it did in Victoria in 2020 and instantly doomed hundreds of unvaccinated old people.

Victoria’s Covid-19 playbook worked. Picture Getty Images

The NSW death toll would be far higher without vaccinations.

Comparisons favourable of NSW’s position with Victoria in 2020 seem misplaced.

Why compare NSW to a time when the Victorian playbook was being redacted, lost and/or chucked out? Why compare bumbles with bumbles?

The NSW 2021 response would be better compared, unfavourably, with the 2021 Victorian response.

There should be no juvenile smugness in declaring Victoria better, especially given the odds-on likelihood of more Victorian lockdowns.

Any sense of rivalry (which, to be fair, isn’t even a thing in Sydney) is misplaced.

For a long time, Berejiklian’s reluctance to stem everyday freedoms seemed an antidote to the overreach of her southern counterpart.

But her diffidence has soured. She has dithered. Her apologetic response seems as quaint as fax machines and Nokia phones.

This blithe lack of insight in NSW’s approach ought to be called out.

Yes, the crisis could be bigger in Sydney. But it should be smaller.

Melbourne learned the hard way. Sadly, it seems Sydney will, too.

Patrick Carlyon is a Herald Sun columnist

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