Residual restrictions are not needed in Sydney, Germany or Denmark and they’re not needed in Victoria

The Andrews Government is acting like a helicopter parent and we’re compelled to play the role of children who cannot be trusted to display commonsense or decency.

We’ve had three Covid cases in our household in recent days, each one a study in bleary eyes and butter menthols.

The patients’ schools aren’t terribly interested, apparently trusting that families are doing the right thing. There has been no blitz in officialese, no being held to account.

Instead, we just do the right thing; avoid people until the tests show only one line.

This tale in ordinariness is absent of the panic about Covid cases in 2020 and 2021. There’s an understanding that the disease is not what it once was.

People wearing masks in Melbourne. Picture: Ian Currie

Ours is a little story being perpetuated across the state, the kind of anecdotal detail that supersedes the overblown era of edicts and decrees.

Case numbers – and who’s counting anymore? – seem meaningless, bar hospitalisations, which will not approach the crisis predicted by the official doomsayers.

When did you last use a QR code? Who hasn’t yanked down a mask in a supermarket? Of those people who have dared venture into the office, who has not, in good conscience, removed their mask because it’s so bothersome?

We make these little decisions all the time. The choices of a 77-year-old with arthritis differ from those of a family of sickly schoolkids. But we are united in a sense. We all follow common sense rather than abide by rules.

Victorians are following common sense. Picture: David Geraghty

As a Johns Hopkins study reflected this month, in pointing out that lockdowns had “little to no effect” in saving lives: “When a pandemic rages, people believe in social distancing regardless of what the government mandates.”

We have been reassessing the risks since about September last year, when rioting bogans dissed their nose at authority and everyone else, more civilly, began applying their own judgments about rights and wrongs.

It was a kind of breakthrough moment when the kicked puppy of Victoria began to wag its tail again.

So why do we still live under restrictions that are almost entirely redundant?

The Andrews Government will introduce minor easing of restrictions on Friday.

Yet QR codes, mask wearing, and yes, the perils of dancing are choices that ordinary people were weighing up for themselves anyway.

The Andrews Government has always acted tardily, as if unconvinced by the overwhelming weight of evidence. It has played the role of helicopter parent. We are compelled to play the role of children who cannot be trusted to display commonsense or decency.

Premier Daniel Andrews and his government are treating Victorians like children. Picture: Daniel Pockett

We wear the legacy of lockdowns, including the longest, in 2020, which only ended after 30 days of 15 or fewer cases a day. As epidemiologist Professor Catherine Bennett later said, almost no other country in the world would be so careful (or reluctant?) to open up.

And, still, we fixate on irrelevances. Many parts of the world are not preoccupied with vaccination certificates and mandatory controls. In Germany and Denmark, for example, they’ve declared that the pursuit of normality trumps the enduring silliness of this or that petty rule.

There are severe costs to delaying a return to the office. Strolling down an almost deserted Flinders St, perhaps stopping to play a spot of late afternoon cricket on the road, shows the continuing gap between pandemic paralysis and a new normal.

Industry groups understandably decry that CBD emptiness; business survival is hardly an optional extra.

You could play a spot of cricket on Flinders St. Picture: David Crosling

Yet the Andrews Government “will consider changes to office-based settings next week”.

It will consider if “it is appropriate to remove the recommendation that Victorians work from home”.

What aspect of the Covid challenge requires so much think music?

Hospitalisations are low. Elective surgery waiting lists grow longer than ever. The spectre of Covid, and the fear of it, has ebbed, as the history of pandemics showed that it always would.

The Covid response is driven now by the sensible judgments of ordinary people. When Andrews speaks of being “grateful”, he once again implies that the response is about governments and orders.

No one makes choices to please the premier. People do not seek pats on the head to vindicate their ways of life.

The draconian past was yesterday, to be judged by history. To suggest that restrictions, as they remain, will stay “not a minute longer than needed” conflicts with bolder approaches elsewhere.

If most residual restrictions are not needed in Sydney, Germany or Denmark, they’re also not needed in Victoria, which boasts higher vaccination rates than almost anywhere.

We collectively live with Covid, as opposed to living in fear that it is lurking in the cough of a colleague or school mate at the next desk.

Victorians, especially the untold multitudes reduced to bedrooms and butter menthols, figured that out all by themselves well before now.