This sucks! This is the fucking worst! Melbourne is officially back in lockdown for at least seven days as of midnight tonight and it is the drizzling shits. And the last thing I, or anyone else in this city, needs to hear right now is someone – person, company, or social media profile – telling us “you got this.” We don’t fucking got this. This stinks.
After enduring a full calendar year, the bulk of which was largely in lockdown, it appeared (at least ever-so-briefly) that the clouds were finally parting. And yet now we’re sitting here, in late May, once again looking at a potentially lost winter thanks to a rising spike of COVID-19 cases.
How on earth do you even begin to reconcile with a fourth major lockdown? How does one even begin to approach that?
Lockdown one: Sure, we were all in it together. Zoom drinks were novel. Toilet paper shortages were funny. Community resilience was high and we were all learning how to bake bread.
Lockdown two: Misery. Blinding, abject, unyielding misery. The all-consuming anxiety of waiting for a daily Dan Andrews press conference. Logging off on a Friday after an entire week of video meetings only to log on to yet another video meeting. Couldn’t travel any further than 5km from home, which is where all the good shit was. Cold as shit, deserted roads, but you could get McDonald’s delivered so there was that.
Lockdown three: Sure, one last quick one just to knock it really on its ass. A coupla days, who cares.
Lockdown four: ????
I dunno, man. Maybe I’m just trying to process this as I type. But all that empty despair from last year is being swiftly replaced with a real exhausted, broad scale anger.
Don’t get me wrong here, individuals who may or may not have waited days while symptomatic before getting tested sure as hell haven’t helped things in the slightest.
But what shits me on the whole is a Federal Government who have fucked a vaccine program up so badly that we can’t even convince people to take the ones we managed to get.
What shits me is that we still haven’t sorted out a purpose-built quarantine facility that is actually set up to handle this kind of thing. We’re over one entire year into this mess and our best, first, and only line of defence against a global pandemic is a fucking airport Holiday Inn for god’s sake.
What shits me is that a State Government’s contact tracing system, that has been held up as being of a cutting-edge standard after learning from past mistakes, still couldn’t figure out that there were two Woolies in Epping.
But above all else I’m just so bloody mad and tired and scared that this might only be the tip of a much larger iceberg, and it’s one that could have been avoided were it not for people in power more concerned with covering their own ass than covering those of the people they represent.
We’re going back into lockdown yet again. Please do not tell us “you got this.” I do not “got this.” None of us do. This fucking sucks.
