Coronavirus South Australia: As lies go, the Woodville Pizza Bar worker’s was a triple-supreme
Lies, like pizzas, come in different sizes. Small, medium, large, family, and party.
As far as lies go, this was a super-supreme, cheese-filled crust, party-sized extravaganza, cooked up by a selfish idiot who — after applying the pineapple — shoved its rough end square up the backside of the South Australian economy.
All with the assistance of the state government, SA Health and the SA Police, acting collectively on the basis of what we know now was fraudulent information.
That’s the scary thing about what has happened in SA over the past few days. It shows the speed and breadth with which governments and bureaucracies can up-end the lives of private individuals and the private sector, ostensibly for the greater good.
And in a state that’s been regarded as an exemplar during the pandemic, the harsh reality is that months of sustained professionalism and calmness has been marred by three days of amateurism and panic over a so-called super-virus that many medicos don’t think was that super at all.
Let’s stop and marvel at the impact this closure has had on South Australia over the past three days.
Weddings and funerals cancelled. Elective surgery banned. The entire Schoolies celebration scrapped. Every pub and restaurant shut, their dumpsters heaving with spoiled perishables.
Almost every business closed, students barred from attending school and university, supermarkets pillaged, bottle shops cleaned out.
Vast traffic jams as unnerved residents queued for as long as 10 hours to have swabs jammed up their snouts at hastily expanded COVID-19 centres across the suburbs. More than 4000 South Aussies forced into quarantine.
Millions and millions of dollars ripped from the economy.
And all because this bloke lied about the fact that he was secretly working at a pizza bar — while also working as a kitchen hand at a medi-hotel — and claiming that he was merely a customer, thereby creating a baseless fear that he may have contracted the virus from a pizza box.
And also because the government immediately acted on it with one of the most draconian lockdowns 2020 has seen.
The man who told this lie is now public enemy No 1 in SA. But as the tragicomic nature of this lockdown passes, broader questions will be asked about the extent to which the authorities reacted to the apparent threat.
These questions go to why the truth wasn’t discovered earlier and whether — even if the man had been telling the truth — such a harsh lockdown could be justified against the agreed national hotspot criteria.
The press conference held by Premier Steven Marshall and his Police Commissioner and Chief Medical Officer was easily one of the strangest things I have seen. Their fury was palpable as they awkwardly admitted that in hindsight the lockdown need not have happened at all.
As of 12.45pm Friday, SA Police had deployed a squad car to the Woodville Road pizza bar and two officers were parked in it outside. I don’t think they were ordering a pizza, even though it’s safe to do so now, apparently.
I don’t think anyone will be ordering a pizza there any more though. As a wry message on the pizza bar’s Google review page on Friday afternoon read: “Incompetent staff. They forgot my garlic bread. They also put the whole state into lockdown.”
For all the broader damage that has been brought by this madness, there is one business that will definitely never recover. This pizza bar is cooked.
The political fallout could be a slower burn.
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