The pandemic stopped the clocks, even reversed them. Our liberty dimmed to limited “freedoms”, to be dispensed or withdrawn according to the guesses of unelected officials.And it’s over. Almost.The dirty, old Band-Aid is coming off. Today, shops open, along with cinemas and indoor pools. When did you last go a movie? Can you even cast back to that time when passing the mailbox was not a premeditated choice?There will be more cases and more deaths. We know this. But the handbrake on life has been released.For some, this will mean more streaming into the night, to pubs and clubs and restaurants, to make up on those long times when freedom was reduced to a luxury extra we could no longer afford.There will be a token crowd at the Derby, and more at Tuesday’s Melbourne Cup. The switch is being gradually flicked. Normal transmission, dare we say, will resume.For others, still numbed by the unnatural privations, there will be no jubilation. Like possums, they are so accustomed to the dark that they instinctively shrink from the sunshine. They suffer the aftershock of choices lost, trapped in emotional cages built to accommodate lives lived in smallness and repetition.For them, languishing or something worse became a default mode of survival. The usual standards of care and appearance got pushed aside, and once unimagined pressures (schooling v work?) became everyday decisions.Of course, most of us found ways to cope. Tucked in a dressing gown all day helped some, as did the late arvo ritual of reaching for the pinot. Some of us kicked a footy almost daily, so that we were both fitter, and less healthy, than we could remember.Last week felt like last month, and vice versa. Kids fixated on screens for something to do. Businesses closed. Training police officers – traditionally sent to city intersections to learn traffic control – waved through imaginary cars. But some of us did not cope. In the vacuum of lockdown, quirks of nature flourished as phobias. Hospital admission rates for mental health and eating disorders soared.The pandemic has taken more than 1050 Victorian lives. From a grand final-sized crowd, fewer than 16 Victorians have died from Covid-19.The virus has infected 82,000 people or more. Its presence engulfed everything, of course, but the raw numbers present favourably against the rest of the world.Yet the toll here is deeper than death rates. Former Prime Minister Tony Abbott penned the best line of the virus fight. Life, he argued, was more than avoiding death. The balance between preserving lives and retaining freedoms had to be the prevailing measure.Lockdowns probably stemmed case numbers, but they also exacted a dreadful price. This was uncharted ground – even Nobel Prize-winning scientists Peter Doherty, who has pondered pandemics for decades, had always overlooked the “human cost” of confinement.Lockdowns were introduced as circuit-breakers, 14 days or less, intended to stopper each outbreak.Rules that restricted who you could see, or where you could go, were enacted.Victorian society has never before been subjected to conditional freedoms – and wholesale restraints. We were like patients in a social experiment who had surrendered their right to refuse treatment.When fines for noncompliance tripled overnight, to $5000, and regional folk were implored to dob in naughty Melburnians who had driven too far, and the police searched parks and rivers for miscreants who sought to fish or chat with a friend, the community response was oddly muted.At the time, it was called a kind of Stockholm syndrome. We were to be chided and patted on the head, like children despatched to our bedrooms, under threat of our piggy banks being raided should we peek out the door.The imprisonment of 3000 people in their homes, without warning, in July last year portended a stridency of approach which hardened this year. Freedom became a commodity to be traded rather than a way of life. Offering freedoms became an inducement to compliance. “It’s the right thing to do,” Andrews said repeatedly.And so we collectively submitted. Some commentators argue to this day that the world’s harshest response to the threat was not an institutionalised case of self-harm.Perhaps future Victorians will wonder why the resistance was so patchy. For we tutted when two older women were accosted by police on a park bench. And we cringed at teenagers being moved on. But for a time — too long a time — we bowed to controls we once would have condemned as unthinkable.A political personality cult was born. Warring parties were divided into Team Dan Or Turn on Dan. This vortex of debate was loaded with buzzwords such as caution, paternalism, care, oppression, suspicion and mistrust.The virus came to be personified as an enemy to be defeated. We lived on a war footing against nature. Andrews called Covid-19 a “wicked enemy” that was “cunning”. If NSW made the first big mistake with Ruby Princess, Victoria trumped it with hotel quarantine. Private security was untrained, ill-prepared and lax in its handling of returning travellers.Leaks spread into the community and nursing homes.The frightful scenes at homes, such as St Basil’s, stunned those Victorians who thought they lived in a first world state. The elderly were neglected and malnourished. Natural selection was no longer a theory in a book. Panic, grief and disorder stamped those weeks. The lack of accountability for the causes still galls a year later. An inquiry’s findings may have been legally sound, given the collective amnesia of its witnesses, but its nonsensical conclusions upset everyone who had endured months of lockdown because of depraved incompetence.This year started better than last. Victoria’s pain of 2020 had moved elsewhere. Understanding for the once unknowable effects of lockdown gathered.But the language here remained a giveaway. Victoria apparently faced a bigger risk — and needed harsher measures — than anywhere else.In May, chief health officer Brett Sutton spoke of a virus variant as an “absolute beast” which moved faster. This was the Kappa variant, mind, not its soon-to-be-released superior sibling, Delta. The research now suggests that Kappa did not move faster.This kind of alarmist response, the reflex for doomsday thinking, helps explain why we suffered more in Victoria. We were directed to fret. We had everything to fear, including fear itself. Extreme responses came to be normalised. As epidemiologist Catherine Bennett and former deputy chief medical officer Nick Coatsworth wrote recently: “…the interpretation of inconclusive evidence in a conservative way has become a trademark approach, and one reason why the Victorian approach has often been more restrictive throughout the pandemic”.They suggested we “respectfully question these decisions”.The lowlight was an unashamed ban on playgrounds, which was supported by no research, and was ultimately exposed as an attempt to stop parents from “de facto” meetings.The ban on alcohol in parks was driven by the same thinking; that lonely kinder mums might double as super spreaders. So, too, the curfew, which in itself spared us no cases, but did keep us bottled up.What was the advice which led to playgrounds being closed? We can’t tell you. Those who formulated the advice — as with those who imposed it — aren’t saying.This is another Victorian theme of the pandemic — overreaching edicts sold as the gospel one month before being downgraded to unnecessary the next.Andrews was losing the crowd by this time. Politics and science clashed, and separating them was fraught. There was no gain for the pain. Government pressers were big on technicalities and small on hope. The details lost their currency. Dan TV had jumped the shark.The infantile triumphalism of a supposed defeat of the Delta variant was tempered by a bigger truth – if Delta had left, it would soon return. We were, briefly, in remission.Double-vaccinated people railed. They’d done everything they had been advised to. Why couldn’t they see their mum? Or watch footy with a friend?A “cheeky charddie” came to mean a clandestine drink. The roads clogged. People were making their own decisions about what they should or should not do.The rage was baldly expressed by high-vis bogans on the West Gate Bridge. But ordinary people, over their cheeky charddies, expressed similar misgivings.Andrews was slow to drop the elimination approach. In August, as Sydney battled 1200 or more cases a day, he insisted that Victoria should strive for “very low” case numbers.He confronted the rhetoric from up north, where the dialogue favoured what you could do as opposed to what you could not. He thundered about “a national plan to vaccinate Sydney”. We knew that freedom was tethered to vaccinations, and we admired the benchmarks that Sydney, a few weeks ahead, boldly aspired to.Victoria always seemed to be lagging, of temperament as well as timing. Sydney is a comparable city. Yet it dared where Melbourne dithered. Sydney would pursue shortcuts to freedom that this bedraggled and buttoned-up counterpart would not. This week, schools were being shut down for solitary cases. Year 12 students unnecessarily suffered uncertainty throughout 2021, as if overlooked for higher priorities.Little kids have fussed over their mandatory masks, in scenes that reaffirm the uniquely Victoria’s fixation with an “overabundance of caution”. If we have got our freedoms back, it’s been in one bureaucratic stroke at a time.The petty hypocrisies of the extreme Victorian approach still thrive. Why would unvaccinated people be allowed to shop in coming days, when they would be banned in a few weeks’ time? How could these unprecedented powers be further concentrated, as planned, to so few?We’ve had twice the deaths in Victoria, the longest lockdowns and the rowdiest protests. These measures are consigned to the past.The rebirth has begun, complete with an unwise reference from Andrews about a “soppy dad”. If he goes to the shops today, he’ll find that supplies of gratitude ran out long ago. And the question remains: what happens when millions of people get locked up for too long?
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