The forgotten human toll of locking up the state

Virus transmission alone should not dictate public health orders in a future pandemic, and border closures must be informed by a nationally agreed framework, experts reviewing the state’s COVID-19 response have urged.

The panel, convened by the Herald to examine how COVID lockdowns were designed and enforced, chiefly in NSW, broadly agreed policymakers overlooked social cohesion and mental health factors when they made public health orders or closed borders to contain the spread of the virus.

They also argued governments should not regard the health and economic outcomes as separate; they were intrinsically linked, and the economic damage from shutdowns and stay-at-home orders would inevitably affect people’s health.

Professor Patrick McGorry, a psychiatrist who specialises in youth mental health and was the 2010 Australian of the Year, said state chief health officers who came from a public health background were too often fixated on virus spread to the neglect of other health indicators.

Nationals MP and former deputy premier Paul Toole; Western Sydney Leadership Dialogue chief executive Adam Leto; Tourism and Transport Forum’s Margy Osmond; former president of Local Government NSW and City of Sydney councillor Linda Scott; and former NSW Police commissioner Mick Fuller - along with mental health expert Professor Patrick McGorry who participated via Zoom - formed the Herald’s expert panel on lockdowns and policing.Credit: Dylan Coker

“We had chief health officers who were actually chief COVID officers,” he said. “They didn’t seem to be able to think about other health consequences and mental health was absolutely the top one they should have been thinking about a bit more.”

For example, during the Delta wave in 2021, NSW resisted introducing a “singles bubble” for people who lived alone until five weeks into the lockdown, even though it was used successfully towards the end of the long Victorian lockdown the previous year. People with an intimate partner were allowed to visit each other the whole time.

“We’re social animals,” McGorry said. “It’s not just the lockdowns, it was the social distancing that really had a nasty effect. That’s where there was, to some extent, a lack of perspective, particularly after vaccines were available.”

Former NSW police commissioner Mick Fuller led the enforcement of public health orders requested by NSW Health and said COVID-19 test results alone drove 99.9 per cent of the health orders throughout the pandemic.

“They didn’t seem to be able to think about other health consequences and mental health was absolutely the top one,” professor Patrick McGorry told the panel.Credit: Dylan Coker

But he warned that “using health data in isolation didn’t always deliver the best outcome”. Fuller said that over time, the crisis cabinet appeared to consider factors beyond raw virus transmission data, including mental health, but “I’m just not sure if that happened quick enough”.

Linda Scott, who as Local Government NSW president herded the state’s 128 councils during the pandemic, said it was wrong to underestimate the impact of certain decisions on social cohesion. Some decisions were clearly unfair.

Linda Scott, president of Local Government NSW during the pandemic, addresses the Herald’s COVID discussion.Credit: Dylan Coker

“We stopped people in western Sydney going outdoors in a way that was arguably worse for their health than we did in areas across the other side of the road,” Scott said, referencing the harsher lockdowns applied to “local government areas of concern” during the Delta wave. “That was very hard to explain to people.”

Premiers’ decisions to close state borders proved especially divisive during the pandemic, eliciting horror stories of people unable to visit dying loved ones, and children separated from their parents for long periods.

The panel acknowledged the need to close borders to limit virus spread, but generally agreed the ad hoc nature of state border closures was regrettable. While they recognised decisions had to be made quickly based on limited information, they called for a more nationally consistent approach to deliver certainty about what threshold of virus spread would cause a border to be closed.

“There just needed to be some uniformity,” said Margy Osmond, head of the Tourism and Transport Forum (TTF). “There needed to be an understandable set of criteria that determined whether a border was closed. Because every state seemed to have a different attitude about what the criteria were.

Uniformity call: former police commissioner Mick Fuller and Margy Osmond, chief executive of the Tourism and Transport Forum.Credit: Dylan Coker

“I understand we are a federation, but the uncertainty that was bred and the additional work it created by having all of these disparate border arrangements and having absolutely no certainty was very bad for the community, and impossible from a business perspective.”

That echoed a recommendation in the TTF’s submission to the Commonwealth’s COVID inquiry, which called for stronger co-ordination and consistent management structures between federal, state and territory governments.

One border closure that caused significant disruption was the New Year’s Eve 2020 decision by Victoria to shut its border to NSW as an outbreak on Sydney’s northern beaches spread to other areas. NSW recorded 10 new cases the day the closure was announced.

Enforced from 11.59pm on New Year’s Day, the decision meant people holidaying in NSW had to rush home or face being locked out of their own state.

Police enforce a checkpoint on the closed border between Victoria and NSW on January 1, 2021. Credit: Jason Robins

Fuller also raised Queensland’s controversial decision to close its border to NSW – starting with hotspots but expanding to the whole state – amid the Crossroads Hotel outbreak in winter 2020.

That closure was vehemently opposed by the NSW government, with then-premier Gladys Berejiklian saying she begrudged her Queensland counterpart Annastacia Palaszczuk for the decision, and the then-health minister Brad Hazzard calling it “appalling”.

In one case, an ACT woman was refused permission to leave hotel quarantine in Brisbane for her father’s funeral. Instead, she was escorted under police guard to view the body while dressed in personal protective equipment.

Despite national cabinet meeting regularly at that time, and then prime minister Scott Morrison saying Australians were in danger of “losing our humanity” when making decisions about COVID, Palaszczuk kept the gates sealed until three days after the October 31 Queensland election.

Then-premiers Annastacia Palaszczuk, Daniel Andrews and Gladys Berejiklian with then-prime Minister Scott Morrison at a national cabinet meeting in December 2020.Credit: Alex Ellinghausen

Former deputy premier Paul Toole, who was part of the crisis cabinet steering NSW’s COVID-19 response, said that in future it must be a “national approach”.

Toole emphasised the disruption to supply chains caused by sudden border closures. “[It] sent the freight industry into an absolute spin,” he said. “We were on the phones constantly, especially [to] Queensland, just trying to get them to change their rules around it.”

In a submission to the federal COVID-19 inquiry, the Queensland government dedicated just one paragraph to border closures, defending what it called “strong decisions” based on health advice. “Border restrictions were reviewed regularly and removed as soon as it was safe to do so,” it said.

The Commonwealth inquiry into Australia’s COVID-19 response does not include actions taken unilaterally by state governments but will examine how evidence informed interventions such as lockdowns in different jurisdictions across the country.

The Herald’s expert panel on lockdowns and border closures followed similar exercises on schools and the COVID-19 health response.Credit: Dylan Coker

While the Herald’s panel noted the unprecedented nature of the pandemic and the urgency with which consequential decisions were made, they said command hierarchies and communication trees instituted during COVID-19 did not always produce the best, or most consistent, outcomes.

For example, Linda Scott said she quickly resolved a problem with road freight and avoided intervention by other authorities by speaking directly to five affected mayors. “So often, powers were implemented when problems could have been solved within 24 hours through relationships,” she said.

Panellists also pointed out positives in the state’s COVID-19 response; in particular, agility and digitisation. They said the pandemic showed change could be effected quickly when necessary if there was collective will. “Government departments were able to do things in a much more timely manner than what they possibly could in any other time,” Toole said.

Scott gave the example of the state government and local councils finding hotel rooms for 3732 Sydney rough sleepers in just two days. “In 48 hours we had housed Sydney’s homeless population,” she said. “It did show that government was able to solve what were otherwise perceived as completely intractable problems.”

As opposition leader, who had only just taken over the Labor leadership weeks before the Delta wave hit, Chris Minns generally offered bipartisan support for the restrictions and health measures brought in by the Coalition government of the day – and for the staged lifting of lockdowns.

Now as premier, Minns says reviewing the COVID-19 response is worthwhile, but he was unwilling to engage with any of the specific concerns raised by the Herald’s expert panel.

“Not every call was right, not every call was wrong. There are always things we can do better to ensure we are prepared for emergencies like another pandemic,” he said.

“At the end of the day, leaders across the world were asked to make critical decisions that would impact millions of people in a very uncertain environment based on the information they had available.”

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