Proud or mad? Melbourne’s marathon lockdown becomes the world’s longest

In white chalk on its Brunswick St blackboard, Fitzroy’s Royal Derby Hotel shouts out a vain plea to the few wanderers on this once-bustling strip: “End the madness”.

Our lockdown drags on. And on.

Federal Treasurer Josh Frydenberg said on Wednesday Melbourne had chalked up “the longest lockdown in the world. Consider that ... People have had enough. People are at their wits’ end. They want their kids back at school. They want businesses to reopen.”

He was a little premature, possibly due to a Sky News report a week before that misrepresented its own figures. But on or about next Tuesday, Melbourne can lay a claim to the unsought-for title of World’s Most Locked Down City of the pandemic, topping Buenos Aires’ 245 total days of stay-at-home orders since the pandemic began.

Rebecca Gelsi and daughter Arabella, 10, in July 2020: one of the many families trying to cope with home schooling.Credit: Eddie Jim

The Age opened its “tip jar” to readers asked for a one-word reaction. In the next hour, 1000 passionate responses painted a picture: angry, safe, relentless, depressing (lots of that), numb, burnout, agony, necessary (plenty of those), exhausting, sensible, frustrating, resilient, harrowing, meh, lonely, angry, accepting, amphibolous (yeah, clever clogs).

Jaded, exhausted, grateful. Lots more frustration, loneliness, depression.

More safe, some proud. And quite a few “f---ed”.

In fact, the longest-lockdown title is up for debate. Take Santiago: this Friday, Chile finally lifted an 18-month curfew, and stay-at-home orders on weekends and public holidays in parts of the country including the capital. Still, a “mobility pass” proof of vaccination will be required to enter public spaces, public transport, restaurants, bars and events.

A child watches as people pass through a decontamination chamber at the La Vega Central fruit and vegetable market in Santiago, Chile, in 2020.Credit: Bloomberg

Not all lockdowns are equal. Oxford’s Blavatnik School of Government “stringency index”, which compares countries’ most strict social-distancing policies, has never put Australia in top spot. Both Argentina and Chile were rated more stringent throughout the pandemic, even at our lockdown peaks. Melbourne never banned outdoor exercise entirely (like Spain and Argentina), or allowed only two visits to the shops a week (like Chile). Toronto banned indoor dining at restaurants for more than 400 days, finally opening up in July.

But there’s a weary consensus that Melbourne soon beats Buenos Aires, Dublin, London and Prague, fellow members of the “200 Club” for days under stay-at-home rules.

So, why us? And was it worth it? And what has it done to us?

“By changing the status quo, changing our lives, people have started to realise ‘it doesn’t have to be this way’.”

Jolanda Jetten, University of Queensland

Taking the last question first is Jolanda Jetten, professor of social psychology at the University of Queensland, who tracks ongoing research on Australians’ mental state.

“We find quite clearly that mental health, not surprisingly, has deteriorated quite a bit in lockdown,” she says. “You just see the graphs, and many more people say they’re struggling, that they’re experiencing far fewer positive emotions and more negative emotions, more frustration, more anger.

“People get by, but they’re under strain and stress.”

We have been cut off from connections that usually act as a mental health buffer, such as sports teams, social networks, community or volunteer groups.

Some of the Australian Open was conducted in front of empty stands.Credit: Eddie Jim

“These are big predictors of mental health, and that is exactly what we couldn’t do during lockdown,” Jetten says.

Experts are tipping a post-lockdown mental health crisis next year, when job losses and other stressors compound their impact.

And there are other changes, too. In 2019, 44 per cent of people agreed they would be happier if they worked less, now 59 per cent do.

“In lockdown, when many of us were at home, we really had to work harder, and it fell with family chores and looking after the kids,” says Jetten. “That’s really draining, and fatigue is a big issue.”

Lockdown also changed views on commuting. Many now wonder, “why would I sit on a train for two hours every day, or drive?”

Chris has been taking the train into the city every day for the past 20 years and now works from home. He misses the commute a little because of the time alone but sees the positives of having more free time. Credit: Luis Ascui

“By changing the status quo, changing our lives, people have started to realise ‘it doesn’t have to be this way’,” says Jetten. “I can have different priorities. People start to think about what they really want to do in the future.”

These crisis-driven lockdowns, and the social isolation they bring, have triggered stress and anxiety. But, as other parts of the world have discovered, so too can fear, death and illness caused by an out-of-control virus.

And there are unexpected twists. A study from the University of Bologna found that different lockdown lengths in different cities did not seem to change their psychological impact. Another US study found that the pandemic wasn’t permanently changing people’s personalities or values, which “are more stable than many people believe”, the researchers said.

While domestic violence has risen sharply in the pandemic, Australia’s — and Victoria’s — suicide rates have fallen. Jetten says this phenomenon was also seen during World War II: a big crisis that affects a whole community can create a “great sense of solidarity” which protects mental health (though it can have the opposite effect, too: the 14th century’s bubonic plague triggered massive violence in Europe and the persecution of Catalans, clerics, beggars and Jews).

Locking down itself can have a mental health protective aspect, says Jetten, because “by locking down there is some sense of control”.

It’s hard to say how many lives have been saved by Australia’s anti-COVID-19 precautions such as lockdowns and border closures because it’s the ultimate “what if” question. But in July, federal Health Minister Greg Hunt estimated 30,000 lives saved (and not just from COVID-19: influenza and pneumonia dropped to from 9th to 17th in the leading causes of death in 2020).

Professor James Trauer, head of epidemiological modelling at Monash University’s School of Public Health, works it out this way: we know death rates with and without vaccination, and restrictions keep a lid on the virus so most people will be first exposed to COVID-19 after their jabs. On the back of an envelope, he estimates about 126,000 lives saved. In Victoria alone, more than 30,000 lives saved by lockdowns.

Simon at a vaccination clinic for the homeless and disadvantaged in July this year.Credit: Chris Hopkins

Trauer says this is the “main game” of lockdowns, especially now, “to try to get as much of the population vaccinated before they’re first exposed to the virus”.

“I feel like we’re at 90 per cent of the way along the road to achieving that,” he says. “We’ve come this far ... and if we achieve that ... we will be one of the parts of the world that has had the most successful response [to COVID-19]. So few parts of the world have been able to do that.”

This may explain why Melbourne has spent so long in lockdown: for us, the health payoff is bigger because the virus was never rampant.

The road from here is clear, Trauer says.

“Of course, we have been through so much and we are just totally sick of it. It’s a shame we weren’t getting people vaccinated two months earlier without this extreme level of lockdown fatigue. But we need to just hold the virus under control for a few more weeks. Giving up on lockdowns now would be just total madness because we’ve come this far.”

While we hold on, we can count the costs and benefits.

Putting a value on human lives is a hotly contested concept in economics that has spawned thousands of formulae. People value lives differently in different circumstances: most would pay more to avoid dying from cancer than dying from a road accident, for example. Even the politics of COVID-19 can influence the figure: if you are anti-lockdown, you value the lives they save less; if you are pro, you value them more. So pinning a dollar sum on the benefits is tough and measuring the costs isn’t much easier.

One Australian economist at a Victorian university, who asked not to be named due to the ferocity of public debate over lockdowns, says it “beggars belief” that we’re still debating our policy response to COVID-19.

“The only sensible policy option was to protect public health until such a time that vaccines were available,” he says. “Countries that did this effectively had much better health and economic outcomes. Careful academic studies make clear that the economic costs are largely due to the pandemic itself rather than lockdowns.”

Residents were stuck in their public housing towers when the Andrews government suddenly locked them down in July 2020.Credit: Justin McManus

He adds: “When we ask whether lockdowns this year are worth it, we must acknowledge that our current situation was largely avoidable. If the Australian population was vaccinated, state governments would not have had to make use of blunt public health instruments.”

Richard Holden, professor of economics at the University of New South Wales, says the key to evaluating lockdowns is to compare them with a realistic alternative.

“Basically, you can’t have a well-functioning economy with an out-of-control pandemic,” he says.

Researchers from the University of Chicago School of Business put this to the test by comparing economic activity in US states with differing pandemic responses. They concluded “legal shutdown orders account for only a modest share of the decline of economic activity”.

Essential food has been available throughout lockdown, including at the Queen Victoria Market.Credit: Justin McManus

What shutdown orders did, they found, was push people to move their consumer activity over from “non-essential” to “essential” purchases: from restaurants to groceries. But 90 per cent of the drop in economic activity was what Holden calls “self-lockdown”, or people hunkering down, unwilling to go shopping or eat out because they were too scared or too sick.

In 2020, Holden says, Australia “could rightly be judged as being world-leading in terms of our response to the pandemic”, both in well-judged public health measures and “incredibly strong fiscal support” for those affected.

If the coronavirus had escaped into the community as it did elsewhere, if levels of infection had matched those in countries such as Italy, Spain, the US or UK, says Holden, “there’s a lot of [economic] carnage before you get things back down to any kind of manageable level”.

“We saw a quarterly drop of GDP in the UK and US that was arguably larger than during the Great Depression,” he says. “That’s what was on the table and that’s what we avoided.”

North Carlton florist Rahnee Moller called in friends and family to help rush out Valentine’s Day orders in the days before yet another lockdown was imposed in February.Credit: Jason South

The months Australia spent mostly out of lockdown and mostly COVID-19-free in late 2020 and early 2021 were a vital boon to consumer confidence, enabling us to avoid the kind of massive financial contraction that can take years, even decades, to recover from.

Ranjan Ray, an economics professor at Monash Business School, says part of the reason Australia, and especially Melbourne, endured such long lockdowns was because compared to other parts of the world, we could afford it. The costs are less, and the benefits more.

Ray says developed countries can lock down faster and more effectively and they can bounce back more quickly afterwards. For developing countries, much more of their economy is “informal” or relies on face-to-face service, and working from home is frequently not an option. This not only makes lockdowns less effective, but it means they have a much bigger effect on inequality, deepening the impact on poorer citizens.

Poorer countries, too, would find it harder to support those in lockdown.

“[Developing countries] were much slower to react not because they didn’t want to, but because they just don’t have access to the international credit which countries like Australia have,” says Ray.

On the “macro level”, he says, Victoria has good prospects to return from lockdown with a manageable debt that can be paid over many years.

But don’t forget the “micro level”, he adds.

“The costs will be felt long term. There are some shops which will never open again, and God help the families behind them, the employees and employers.

“A generation of shopkeepers, sole traders, will be really feeling it.”

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