My name is John and I am a South Australian.
Well, I was decades ago.
Many of my closest friends live there, I own half a house just across the border and it’s where I got my start.
After enduring months of the awful Melbourne breakout, the best advice I could offer if the lockdown is ever replicated in Adelaide is to get out.
First get tested and then if you are negative, get your skates on.
Follow the law, leave in an orderly manner for your beach house, country manor or cave in Coober Pedy.
Because living in an extended lockdown is awful.
The lesson from the Victorian experience is that as awful as a lockdown is, it works, and that means the South Australian government will be under enormous pressure to hit the virus as hard as it possibly can.
It’s premature to say what will happen in Adelaide and if the epidemiologists are right, there is every chance that the cluster will be busted.
If it isn’t and the numbers explode, I wouldn’t be hanging around for the fallout.
Victoria on Tuesday recorded no new cases for the 18th straight day and while there is no likelihood of elimination, the suppression process has absolutely worked.
For all the criticism of Dan Andrews – a lot of it legitimate – Victoria is now emerging globally as a gold standard on how to snuff out the virus.
This is not to support the hotel quarantine idiocy or the over the top lockdown model but it is to report the obvious.
The mob who have backed Sweden’s “let her rip” system are looking increasingly silly as the joint goes to custard and lockdowns become a valid option to stop the virus’s run.
While various health experts are making claims about what got Victoria over the line, the fundamental reason seems to be that if you stop people moving then the virus stops moving too.
This really makes some sense and will be why South Australian Premier Steven Marshall has already started hitting the restrictions button.
The question will be how hard and how long. None of this is to support the reactionary approach of the states and territories that have panic-closed their borders because it’s likely we will know within a week just how bad the South Australian outbreak might become.
The politics of the South Australian outbreak will be interesting in a parochial and national sense.
If Marshall can defeat the outbreak, then South Australia will be the second Liberal state to have managed the virus well.
If he doesn’t, then it will provide Labor with a political defence in Victoria, or at least use the example of why the virus is such a bitch to negate.
There will be a lot of South Australians who will be anxious about the outbreak.
They should be; the virus is bad but the lockdown for me was worse.
If there is an uncontrollable breakout and you get the chance, head for the hills.
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