Whatever happened to living with Covid?

Greg Sheridan’s despairingly accurate article “Quarantine centres must be built, and built now” (3/6) rightly asks why Victoria has suffered unlike any other Australian state or territory. Down here in the great southern state it is impossible to overestimate the frustration and mental despair faced by millions of weary Melburnians who now effectively face their fifth lockdown, all for the sake of a handful of new Covid cases.

Daniel Andrews told us from the outset last year that the coronavirus does not discriminate, so why has it remarkably done so towards those living south of Albury and east of Mount Gambier?

Despite the Labor spin, it cannot be merely a matter of bad luck or sheer coincidence. After much consideration, the only probable conclusion I can make is ministerial incompetence. The Victorian government essentially has one tool - a hammer - and thus every problem looks like a nail.

Compare our approach to NSW, which managed the Northern Beaches outbreak late last year without having to shut down an entire city. To be blunt, Victoria’s approach to managing Covid has been akin to solving a domestic rat problem by bulldozing the house; much easier to control people’s freedoms than control a virus’s spread.

Yes, we will eventually get our Covid rates down and they will hopefully stay low, but the hearts and minds of the people will have been lost.

Peter Waterhouse, Craigieburn, Vic

Could our Victorian leaders please stop using fear-inducing language as we endure our fourth lockdown? What happened to learning to live with outbreaks of Covid — the “new normal”? Did the powers-that-be really mean hard lockdowns as our default position? It seems the state government has only one switch — on or off. Areas where outbreaks occur need a targeted response, as NSW has been doing successfully.

This all-or-nothing response is devastating people’s livelihoods, disrupting the social/emotional networks we know are so essential to sound mental health and further damaging an already weakened economy. For all our sakes, please have enough humility to learn from others.

Judy Michelangeli, Wheelers Hill, Vic

To hear on Thursday that a 90-year-old man in a nursing home who is fully vaccinated and completely asymptomatic has the Covid virus is non-news of the highest order; just another fact to stoke the fires of fear and compliance with whatever overreaction is being put in place.

The Victorian government says the “Indian variant” is as contagious as measles and that lockdown has to continue for a further seven days to prevent “mass deaths”. Where is the evidence for either of these two statements?

Second, why does any Covid community transmission elicit the same panicked response it did 12 months ago? Before contact tracing systems were largely operating successfully, before vaccines were available, before we knew that vaccines also helped stop the spread, before medical responses to symptomatic Covid infections became far more informed and successful, leading to hospital admittance being rarely needed, before we knew that the most common symptom arising from a Covid infection was nothing (asymptomatic)?

Surely the time is overdue to start factoring in all of these changes and successes within any government response to this no-longer-so-new pandemic? After all, due to a whole range of successful innovations we no longer respond to HIV infections like we used to back in the 1980s.

The rationale for not having a more nuanced response commensurate with everything we have learned about this virus in the past year seems frankly absurd.

Maggie Woodhead, Swan View, WA

Greg Sheridan is absolutely right: “Quarantine centres must be built and built now”. Hotel quarantine has been shown on numerous occasions to leak like a sieve, mainly because most modern hotels have industrial-scale ducted air conditioning and ventilation: a surefire recipe for uncontrolled virus circulation.

To me, Sheridan’s approach to build in each state and territory clusters of quarantine cabins with their own ventilation and airconditioning makes very good “common sense”. But it must be done now, before the coronavirus and its mutations spread and multiply out of control.

Douglas Mackenzie, Deakin, ACT