If South Dakota recorded five new coronavirus cases in one day, they would be dancing in the streets. If five new cases were recorded in the south of France, they’d be popping the corks on bottles of Pommery.
South Australia recorded five new cases yesterday, a rate of infection that would be regarded as a soaring triumph in almost every country on earth. Yet in Australia, half the Federation immediately reinstated a raft of business-wrecking, job-destroying, family-splitting border closures, suggesting that despite the agreement struck by the states last week, at the first tiny hint of trouble half the nation’s leaders went to water.
There is a school of thought that some state premiers aren’t basing their border closures on hard data. They are — it’s just that the data appears to take the form of opinion polls.
The stories coming out of SA right now are equal parts heartbreaking and absurd. Alisha Toy and her five-year-old daughter, Stevie, flew from Adelaide to Perth on Sunday and when they landed, they were told to quarantine for a fortnight or return immediately to Adelaide, as news of the Parafield cluster broke while they were mid-air.
They haven’t gone within coo-ee of any hotspots in Adelaide’s northern suburbs cluster. They have no symptoms of anything. They were just heading to Perth for three days to see Stevie’s older brother, nine-year-old Mitchell, who hasn’t seen his mother or sister since January. This separated family is the human face of an arbitrary border closure that is dividing families and damaging business off the back of what increasingly looks more like a poll-driven response than science-driven response to COVID.
“We haven’t seen Mitchell since Australia Day and I was so glad that I popped over then on a whim for that weekend as my ex-husband had him last Christmas too,” Ms Toy said. “Under our shared care arrangements, he comes here every school holidays and I go over every couple of months for weekends but obviously all that stopped this year.
“I had been checking and checking about the border and when they announced its reopening last weekend, we booked a flight and jumped on a plane straight away, so to get turned back like that was so distressing and very confusing for the kids.”
WA authorities let Ms Toy self-isolate at her former husband’s house on Sunday night on the proviso that she left the next day.
She flew out on a noon flight to Adelaide with her daughter on Monday.
“Explaining it all to the kids has been impossible,” she said.
“We don’t know when we are going to be together again.”
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