Lockdown Letup!

As of today, the 111-day lockdown in Melbourne has finally ended, with two days of zero new COVID-19 cases on Monday and Tuesday. Travel is still restricted to a 25 km radius within the Melbourne metropolitan area, but we can now leave our houses for any reason at all again, instead of just the four approved reasons¹ that've been the law of the land for nearly too long to remember at this point.

Sometimes referred to as Lockdown 2.0, I'm lumping it in with the first lockdown from ~March to mid-May as The Great Melbourne Lockdown of 2020, since I (more fool I) held off on actually emerging from the first one for a few weeks out of an abundance of caution. Had I been in any other state (or even city in Victoria) I'd have been fine, but due to a combination of bad luck and bad decisions that led to COVID-19 getting out of the quarantine hotels via private security guards I was just about to resume external activities in late June when the second lockdown happened. Maybe it wasn't so bad for the people who enjoyed the few weeks of freedom in late May and June, but for me I've been effectively locked down from mid-March to late October.

I find myself a bit conflicted at this point. Even now, I'm not entirely unhappy to be staying home; it's nice being able to pick the time I want to go outside, instead of being forced to tramp through whatever weather we happen to be having around the time the trains are running, and I'm saving something like 1.5 hours a day in commute times (plus the costs). But I'm also quite happy to have the option of leaving; I'm going to see about heading into Swinburne this weekend² and pick up as much of my painting supplies and equipment that have been sitting there for seven months as I can. Even if I personally don't particularly want to be leaving my house all that much, there's something that eats away at your mind like acid when you're not allowed to. I think I may see about getting involved with prison ministries in future; if nothing else, this has given me a lot more empathy for the incarcerated and a greater appreciation for personal freedom.

For now, at least, Melbourne seems to be in a pretty good place; there will undoubtedly continue to be scattered cases over the coming days, as we definitely haven't eliminated the virus, but hopefully the government's beefed up its contact tracing enough that it can jump on any outbreaks. For all of the hardship it's been, at least we're looking to be in a much better place than much of the rest of the world which is rapidly spiraling out of control in terms of case numbers. The big question going forward is, will there be a third wave? I'm struck by how well the first two waves here in Melbourne mirrored those of the 1918 H1N1 influenza outbreak, which, tellingly, went through three waves with the second being much worse than the first. Of course, the rest of Australia as this point has only been through effectively a single wave, proving that it's possible to break out of this morbid historical re-enactment, so here's hoping we can break out of it here as well in the future. A hui hou!

¹ Grocery shopping, (essential) work, (essential) education, and personal exercise.

² If I can get security to let me into the astronomy building; after enough people were flouting the more lax “work from home if you can” restrictions between the two lockdowns Swinburne deactivated everyone's security cards to stop people from coming on to campus to work.