Melbourne residents will be locked down from midnight on Wednesday. It is both easier and much harder this time around.
Easier because remote working routines have already been established and because, this time, we know what to expect. And harder, because we know what to expect.
Gone is the optimism that powered the first Australia-wide lockdown in March, where people spoke of flattening the curve and experimented with baking sourdough and bought jigsaw puzzles for their children after the prime minister declared them “absolutely essential”.
The curve has flattened, bent, and bounced back up. The jigsaw puzzles have all been completed, and children who were prepared to go along with the first seven-week lockdown being a fun adventure are now anxious. Holidays were cancelled, again.
'This lockdown seems different': second time around, Melbourne is on edge
Hello, your Aussie reporter on the ground here. Thank God, I don't live in Melbourne. My town is approx. 45 miles away. Which isn't much but it might just be enough. First a little demography - the state of Victoria is very Melbourne-centric. Out of a population of 6.6 million, 5 million live in Melbourne. The next largest place - mine - has just 260,000. So there's a massive difference between the relatively densely-peopled capital and the 80,000 sq miles of quite empty countryside.
When the pandemic first hit we went into strict state-wide lockdown through late March to mid May. This did the trick and our caseload of infected people, which was never very big anyway, reduced to a tiny amount. We got to the point where we all-but eliminated community transmission of the virus and the only new cases we were getting were from people bringing it with them on flights from overseas. All overseas arrivals, whether sick or not, were placed in mandatory 2-week quarantines in hotels in Melbourne.
And that's where it's all gone wrong. By late May we'd started to ease restrictions and people had much more freedom of movement and association. There were still limitations and social distancing rules enforced in public places, but we were on the path to semi-normality, with restaurants, gyms etc. starting to re-open. But the hotel quarantine was completely screwed up. Instead of using professionals to guard the hotels - be they health personnel, police or army - the state government skimped and used untrained, unqualified private security guards. Through sloppy work and hygiene practices by early June some of them caught Covid-19 from the people who had it in the hotels and spread it to their families and other workplaces, right at the time when people were starting to gather in larger groups again. Before anyone really knew what had happened it was back out in the Melbourne suburbs again.
It's now got to the point where there are over 200 new cases a day in Melbourne. And it is indeed almost entirely in Melbourne. We've had a very few isolated cases in the regional areas, but all the big increases and outbreaks are in the capital. So we've locked down the entire Melbourne metropolitan area and people there are back to being housebound except for reasons of work, education, essential shopping, care or exercise. People otherwise can't leave Melbourne, and we on the outside can't enter in, but are otherwise free to carry on relatively free lives. The state has literally been divided between the city and country folk. Hopefully this works and in time the numbers go down again and the outbreak is contained to Melbourne alone.
As the article says, it's going to be really interesting to see how people cope with a second strict lockdown. A lot of people's goodwill, discipline and resiliency have been depleted not only by the first one, but by the fact that the same government that is now shutting people back up was largely responsible for the new outbreak that has necessitated doing so. People are going to really struggle with this, especially children and teenagers. It's a long road ahead.
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