After a fourth month absence, I am back with a special “circuit breaker” edition of Project COVID Skies. The reason for this edition is that on Friday 12th February 2021, Dan Andrews the premier of Victoria had announced a stage 4 lockdown that would last for 5 days. The reason for this lockdown is that they had 14 cases of the ‘UK strain’ of the Corona virus which had come through hotel quarantine at the Holiday Inn (airport). It had spread to a worker and some of the close contacts.

The theory the government is going with is that a person that was positive in quarantine had used a nebuliser and that the fine droplets from the nebuliser were able to spread across the floor of the hotel that they were on infecting others. There was a point of contention in the last few days as to if that person had made officials aware of their use of the nebuliser.

Either way, the end result was that even though there were no mystery cases in the state of Victoria, the whole state including regional areas was placed into hard lockdown. This course of action did not sit well with a large part of the public and for many the Stockholm Syndrome with Dan Andrews was now over.

This was evidenced with some flagrant disregard of the chief health officers direction and compliance on mask wearing was incredibly low. I had noticed myself around the suburb of maybe only 10-20% compliance outside and only being adhered to near the shops.

From the 18th February 2021 we will have restrictions reduced and can mostly get on with everything again. Gathering limits have been reduced and mask wearing is just required where social distancing cannot be observed. As I write this there is yet to be any announcements from the states that once again closed their borders to Victoria in terms of if they will be relaxing their stance. NSW didn’t close their border and requested people self isolate for the 5 days.

In the last four months Adelaide and Perth had also had these short and hard lockdowns on the back of very small case numbers. There is an absolute panic when there are any cases in any state except NSW. These reactions and instant shutting of borders is killing the tourism industry. There is no confidence in travel as at any moment a quick trip or a holiday can be turned into a nightmare where you can be locked out of your own state and incur massive expenses for additional accommodation and changing travel plans.

Just prior to Christmas there was an outbreak on the northern beaches of Sydney which resulted in that area going into lockdown. It also resulted in closing the rest of Australia to anyone who had been in the greater Sydney area. The outbreak did get out into western Sydney and had the potential to take off but with close and casual contacts doing the right thing and isolating the outbreak was brought under control. NSW has now gone more than 30 consecutive days without any community transmission, the first time since the start of the pandemic.

I was also caught up in the border wars when Victoria closed its border to NSW. Prior to Christmas the border was closed to Sydney and regional NSW was declared a ‘green zone’ meaning you were able to travel from that area into Victoria. We had planned to be in Sydney for Christmas and had to cancel those plans. After watching the case numbers, which were steady and declining, we chose to drive to Newcastle to visit Dad. We drove inland, avoiding Sydney and adding an extra 5 hours of driving time (as well as a nights accommodation) to an otherwise straight forward trip. We had two solid days in Newcastle and could see the writing was on the wall and were preparing to return to Melbourne on Saturday 2nd January to Sunday 3rd January, ahead of our scheduled plans. What happened on new years eve the Victoria government changed regional NSW to an orange zone and gave us one day, new years day, to get back over the border before it closed to NSW. This was based on 0 cases being in regional NSW.

We left 3am new years day and got to the border at 1pm after driving the extra 5 hours inland (even though we could have gone from Newcastle to the Southern Highlands without stopping). It took an hour to get through the border checkpoint at Albury-Wodonga and we arrived home at 7pm after a straight drive of more than 1200km with a two year old.

I do not regret making the journey and was appreciative of at least being able to spend some time with family. Sadly, the Central Coast LGA was also red zone from Christmas and even though I was but a 20 minute drive from my mothers grave site, I could not go, as if I had, I would have found myself locked out of Victoria.

I think 2021 may have said to 2020, “You think you were bad, hold my beer!”