Coronavirus: Consistency is key as lockdown fatigue sets in

In its determination to avoid a wider, business-crippling, stay-at-home order, the Andrews government has used a bureaucratic formula to decide which Melbourne suburbs to lock down that has exempted the postcode with the state’s third-highest coronavirus case count.

Almost half of Victoria’s 442 active cases on Friday fell outside the 10 locked-down postcodes, prompting Premier Daniel Andrews to concede that the lockdown and formula on which it is based may be reviewed.

Those among the 310,000 people locked down in Melbourne’s north and west, some of whose postcodes have only two or three active cases, are rightly questioning why their businesses have been shut down and families ordered to stay home, while the residents of postcode 3031, which takes in Flemington and Kensington immediately northwest of the CBD are not under lockdown, despite 20 active cases.

The government did not directly respond to a request for an explanation on Friday, but it appears the state’s third-worst COVID-19 postcode escaped a stay-at-home order because it falls between the cracks of local government area classification, spanning the City of Melbourne and Moonee Valley LGAs.

The mood in Victoria is very different from the “all in this together” manner with which the state’s first lockdown and wave of infections were approached, with high levels of activity amid school holidays and considerable social distancing fatigue — not to mention the challenge posed by COVID-19 conspiracy theories, as exemplified by 10,000 people in hotspots refusing to be tested.

The second wave may well prove much more difficult to suppress than the first, but if suppression is the Andrews government’s aim, it will need to ensure its rules are simple, consistent and make sense.