Coronavirus: Lockdown’s pretzel logic defies common sense

Of all the horrors provided by 2020, the avoidable deaths of four newborn babies in a First World country like ours because of South Australia’s sluggish ­bur­eau­cracy and Victoria’s ham-­fisted lockdown will do me.

After a checkered recent past, the words “SA Health” had become something of a byword for excellence in SA as the state eased its way through lockdown with relative ease thanks to high COVID-19 testing, rigid quarantine and effective contact tracing.

Now the health department is in the frame for rejecting sober-minded advice last year of locally based medicos about the need to reinstate cardiac surgery for bubs at the Adelaide’s Women’s and Children’s Hospital.

The hideous endpoint to this tale is that it was deemed that when these babies were born with serious heart problems, they could not be flown to Melbourne because of the lockdown.

With competing bureau­cracies in the frame, it’s hard to get an accurate bead on the chain of command, as per the “who’s on first?” stylings we have seen at their most vaudevillian at Daniel Andrews’ quarantine ­inquiry.

When these four babies were born and it became apparent they needed urgent surgery that couldn’t be performed in SA, their families were advised that Victorian doctors could not come to Adelaide to retrieve them as was usual practice because of the Melbourne lockdown.

At the same time, SA Health agreed that because the babies were immuno-compromised, they would be best kept away from Melbourne’s high number of COVID-19 cases.

It’s hard to fathom the pretzel logic at play whereby babies in need of lifesaving surgery in Melbourne were kept out of Melbourne for their apparent safety, with the avoidable result becoming tragically inevitable.