Post lockdowns, what will life be like in Australia? Should we prepare now?
Last night I had an epiphany. I have been tirelessly doom scrolling, presser watching and article inhaling over the past 18 months, trying to make sense of this pandemic and how to come to terms with it (and perhaps even find some peace in it somewhere). My relentless watching of daily numbers and political commentary always comes at a high cost; most nights going to bed stressed and depressed.
I start the next morning again with some false sense of something, anything changing. I hope to see a light at the end of this infernally long tunnel. Last night, something changed for me, something I wasn’t expecting. I watched a segment on Israel’s vaccine rollout. As a nation, they are the envy of all us ‘slow rollout nations’, with 80% plus of their eligible population being vaccinated against COVID-19. I sat with wide eyes looking for some hope that life in Israel (and therefore life here) might look very different after we have 80% protection from this insidious blight. What I saw was utterly sobering. Things are very different there to what we are currently experiencing. Yes they have freedom but they also have sky high cases numbers. The realisation truly sinks in at this point, this is not over. Shit. We are with this plague for the foreseeable future. After tears in the dark, my hands fumbling bare, into the Coco Pops box and pushing handfuls into my face, I found myself having a moment of realisation and even some resigned sense of hope. My epiphany was that I really needed to move on mentally. Move on from the current hell hole of lockdown-fun-town, to the next phase of the shitshow. Sounds not fun at all, but ok, I’ll bite.
I am not anti-lockdown in any way and I find the inane flow commentary of anti-lockdown nonsense both annoying and extremely unhelpful. I have been staunchly defending lockdowns because they work and the alternative, without adequate vaccination, is unthinkable. Victorians have, as we all know, endured the most pain, with now 200+ days of lockdown. The pain is real and visceral. Last year we pulled ourselves along the floor to our home offices every day like a pack of drunk slugs and diligently stuck to the health orders because we knew it was for the greater good. Dan said, despite the misery, that we could crush it and we bloody well did!! We had a summer of freedom and we were on the beers in a big way.
2021 rolled around and we jumped on the new year with our natural born zest for life, out in the fresh air but unfortunately by February we were back — snap, crash, bang into another lockdown. “It’s cool, it’s cool, we got this minor inconvenience, we are experts”.
By May’s lockdown, we were still a bit tentative but mostly cool as cucumbers. Wanker Coffee from the local was still keeping us going.
By July, the beginnings of a foul 2020 winter-long lockdown stench was in the air and we all knew it. We showed up with happy faces at school pickup and in our Zoom meetings but there was a trickling sense of doom just as the days shortened and cooled.
August came like an aggressive sales person knocking on the door, just as the baby has gone to sleep but we thought, “Yep, ok we do this again. Just a short stint yeah? Lockdown №5 like Mambo №5? Hahaha! LOLz” (I can hear Jimmy Rees’ Tasmania character giggle)
9 days later, hard Locky D. Then lockdown extension. Bam! Ok shit’s real.
Something changed at that moment and if you follow the timeline, it’s not hard to see why. We Victorians are a bunch of stellar individuals who love our state, love our town with all our sporting and artistic melting pots that make us the dynamic and eclectic bunch we are. I love my Melbourne, I love our regions and I am so proud of us as a community. I feel that (despite a few brainless protestors) each of us would gladly hold a hose. This is why this is hard to say. We as Victorians have reached our limit, we all know it and we all feel it. Something has changed. Ok we are not going to go out and yell at Brett Sutton for being too handsome or hold an engagement party against the health directions (oh ok bad example). We will continue to be diligent citizens but we know that the wind has changed.
What we need now is a change of expectation and a change of focus, to be able to withstand the coming months of the very necessary lockdowns. Adapting to the new future vision will be our only saving grace. The hard truth is that we can no longer crush the virus (Dirty Delta) and we will most probably never live at COVID zero again. That ship is leaving the docks, tethered only by the thinnest thread.
So what is the shift, how do we quantify it? How do we shift our goals and vision for life as it and not for how we thought or hoped it would be. Why do we feel hit by a truck now and not in lockdown #5?
Well, contributing factor number 1 — Sydney. The dramatic increase of cases and chaos paired with the clusterfuck of political incompetence have made Sydneysiders confused and despondent. The numbers are one thing but the sense of NSW giving up is becoming thick in the air like a teenage boy testing out Lynx in the supermarket. Victorians can’t really understand it considering our Game-of-Thrones-fortifying-for-war immense effort last year. The sense of inevitable failure in NSW is a horror show and we view it from afar, frame by bloody frame. Collectively, all of Australia wished we’d returned this fucking VHS 3 months ago. The NSW emotional death creep has made its way in through our borders just like the virus itself. We hold tight to the mast as we watch Sydney exhale the hope of COVID zero forever.
Like it or not (or even know it or not), we are already in the next phase of pandemic life (worst band name ever) Now we just need to look up, look around and see up ahead, for the sake of our poor heads. With record calls to Lifeline and an estimate of up to 35% of us needing the help of a mental health professional, life needs to be different from what it is now — in our heads at first and then in reality — as soon as it is humanly possible.
This is one prediction of the winding road ahead…
NSW will get to 1000–1500 cases a day before there is a serious outcry from the federal and state governments. The Federation will be seriously tested. Gladys will then scrap the existing health directives in favour of a one-size-fits-all set of rules that simplify and significantly tighten existing ones. NSW inhabitants will be so over it that compliance becomes an even bigger issue for law enforcement.
NSW will endure months more intense lockdown until those in charge resignedly agree that around 100 cases a day at 80% vaccination is as good as it gets. Borders will remain closed to NSW for another 6 months.
Victoria and the other states are in and out of lockdown until the end of the year or to when 80% are vaccinated. We are all going insane but maybe start to set our sights on a new target, a target of no more lockdowns at the same time living with Delta.
Come 2022, we are opening up, still afraid and tentative, but open. The lockdown nightmare has gone for now. We regain some sense of hope and joy.
Then comes the next phase. Cases start to spike seemingly uncontrollably and shockingly, compared to what we are used to in Australia. We start to see thousands of cases a day, up to 40 deaths a day. Businesses demand vaccination certificates for working or even entering a premises. Vaccination is offered to all, but 20% still don’t take it up. This virus becomes the virus of the unvaccinated. We see the dreadful caseloads and stress on our hospitals and deaths and part of us says “well you should have got vaccinated” but deep in our souls we ache for our people. Life becomes this — normal as it can be, a weird new normal. We have a rollcall of booster shots and roster to measure immunity in the community constantly. Overall immunity will wane at times, breakthrough infections happen. Case numbers are not focussed on, as much as hospital admissions. Our children and vulnerable are the entire focus of vaccinations until we are all safe as possible.
This goes on for a couple of years until the entire world reaches a level of herd immunity. Not quite what we were all thinking really, is it? I for one, was thinking COVID zero will be most definitely achievable, and I put all my eggs in that homemade craft basket.
So, my epiphany (and I can’t believe this actually makes me feel better), is that life will not be what we thought but knowing that gives us new roadmap (that word is ruined forever) and a target to train our eyes on as we slowly release ourselves from the half-drowning-whilst-treading-water state that we are currently in. We need to move on now, today, in our heads at least, until our golden 80% is reached.
We have an entirely new set of challenges but we will adjust. We will incorporate new information and advice as we have done so well throughout this nightmare. Most importantly, we will have a reprieve from non-stop lockdowns. We will live freely — albeit ‘COVID freely’.
Gone will be these long days of lockdown with their ongoing sense of incoming panic attacks whilst strapped to a chair.
Freedom days will come, we will see them in full bloom. They will not be what we expected or wanted but they will still be beautiful. Let’s be sunflowers and turn our heads to face the sun. Stop following the case numbers, stop doom scrolling. Do the right thing and stay at home (as if you ever left). If we move on from the old thinking of COVID zero — and after 80% vaccinations and low enough case numbers, we can start to head towards living a new future and thinking of that may also give us some peace in the here and now.
