Coronavirus Australia: Victorian lockdowns and the lurch towards institutionalised Covid restrictions

Acting Victorian premier James Merlino, right, aged care workers in Victoria queuing for their vaccine jabs, top left, and the empty streets of locked-down Melbourne. Pictures: NCA/NewsWire

The Victorian government is lurching ominously towards institutionalised Covid-19 restrictions.

The government is clear that even the end of the 14-day lockdown will come with ongoing curbs on life as we knew it in 2019.

It must be stressed, even once the full shutdown ends.

In order to adhere to this strategy we must all accept the health advice, which seems to be quite clear.

Victoria – but no other Australian state – is in danger of becoming a down under version of Taiwan and Singapore, which previously had been virus success stories.

Where once the virus was under control, it has transitioned into a repetitive nightmare in Victoria alone, but one that can be managed in NSW.

The Victorian numbers are still not outrageously high.

The Melbourne hymn sheet is certainly different compared with Sydney and it’s a fair bet that NSW would not be in an extended lockdown if it had the same caseload.

This makes it hard going for those in the southern capital who have grown increasingly tired of the clampdown but perhaps too tentative to go against the health advice.

It’s a good thing that the health experts are still in charge.

But the Andrews government needs to be extremely careful that it sticks to the script of reasonableness.

The government was accused by some health experts on Wednesday of overstating the challenge it faced.

Indeed, chief health officer Brett Sutton seemed to tone down the rhetoric of the viral challenge that was being faced in Melbourne.

Serious? Absolutely.

But maybe not more substantially so than in the past.

For we all know that casual transmission is a significant risk of Covid-19 and that it can live for weeks on surfaces like bank notes and ATMs.

The government has sensibly toned down many of the restrictions in regional areas, given that there is effectively no virus.

But by restricting access to the regions around the looming long weekend, it is adding to the economic pain of the travel and hospitality industries.

So there are victims everywhere, most of them economic.

And that’s not even debating the restrictions that will come at the end of this 14-day lockdown.

It is quite likely that many businesses will be terminated by the government decrees, which are increasingly risk averse in a risky environment.

No-one wants these awful restrictions and no-one wants the virus to spread.

The Victorian government will need to find a way to live with the virus, an aim that fundamentally requires dramatically more vaccinations.

And that, my friends, is up to Canberra.