An escalating Covid situation

 I faced a Covid conundrum on Saturday. 

It might not have been a conundrum for some, but I have never liked the punitive tone of Victoria’s Covid response, set primarily, but not solely by the Premier. 

It makes me wince when a glowering Dan Andrews delivers another hectoring press conference about how “rule-breakers” threaten the “precious thing” of Covid suppression or elimination. 

However, many Victorians have apparently lapped this up.  

After the Premier went on a particularly strong, even sweary, indignation bender about an illicit Jewish engagement party (an engagement party! WITH SHARED JOY! HOW DARE THEY!) the couple involved said they had to hire bodyguards. 

Some cheered taking playground swings and slides off kids. CHO Brett Sutton stated the ban was about the “non-compliance” of some naughty parents, who (heaven forbid) met in parks and took off their masks to socialise a little after weeks of lockdown. 

Anyway, I was in Highpoint on Saturday, the monstrous mall in Melbourne’s inner-west. 

It seemed monstrous in an extra sense because with most shops closed, the lights dimmed and its expanses largely deserted, it could have been an extravagant set for zombie apocalypse drama The Walking Dead. 

As I approached the escalators toting my Woolies bag four police converged from the other direction. 

It probably testifies of “white middle-class male privilege” but normally I find having police around to be a positive and reassuring but I have grown much warier of them during the Covid period. 

Even before Victoria’s mammoth second lockdown police issued twice the amount of fines than any other state, as venerable economist Saul Eslake pointed out. 

We have seen absurdly dystopian scenes of police surrounding and then pinning recalcitrant sunbakers to the ground, with officers kneeling on them in a fashion disturbingly similar to the George Floyd arrest in the US. 

Last year police handcuffed pregnant Zoe-Lee Buhler and forced her to the floor in front of her children for the offence of posting online an invite to a protest, that specifically asked people to rally in a Covid-safe masked and distanced manner. 

Around that time Victorian Police Assistant Commissioner Luke Cornelius called anti-lockdown protesters the “tin-foil hat wearing brigade” and their actions “batshit crazy”. 

According to news.com.au, these comments were widely well received. Not be me though. I still fail to see how this was an appropriate (let alone sensitive) way for a theoretically impartial upholder of the law to talk about members of the general public, whatever he might think of their ideas. 

A few months ago a watchdog cleared police over the tactics used to subdue bi-polar man Tim Atkins, who late last year knowing he was about to have an episode went to Northern Hospital in Epping for help but was left waiting for in ER for over 20 hours. 

Eventually he snapped breaking a hospital window before being surrounded by police on a road. 

He was a large man and potentially dangerous but you would imagine police should be trained to deal with that type of situation by means other than ramming him with a vehicle and stomping him into a coma. 

So, on Saturday when one of the officers gestured for me to pull my mask over my nose I did so very quickly. 

It was fair cop… you got me guv… I still can’t wear masks properly without fogging my glasses.  

I and the officers were about two-thirds of the way down on the escalators when two African teenage girls (I estimate between 15 and 19 years of age) sauntered past on the lower level not wearing masks at all.  

I wondered what the police would do. 

They got off the escalator and walked in the opposite direction.  

Should I have asked the police if they saw the girls? Or even insisted they enforce the law?  

Police do not always take kindly to being told how to do their jobs, something it probably won’t surprise you to discover I have learnt first-hand. 

Maybe they knew something about the girls but they certainly looked older than 12, the age of mandatory masking, and there were no parents in sight. 

It seemed most likely they couldn’t be bothered – an attitude to Covid rules I have noticed ever more frequently. 

Fewer people are wearing masks or social distancing, in parks or near shops, there is sometimes a “before” sense of conviviality, as if there were never such a thing as a killer microbe out of China. 

This cannot be a surprise, experts warned us that the “sledgehammer” (as epidemiologist Catherine Bennett calls it) approach of lockdowns would have diminishing returns as fatigue sets in.  

One of the endlessly disorienting features of the Bizzaro world that Covid has created has been the inversion of political attitudes to policing. 

Progressive left types, with exceptions of course, have become staunch and harsh cheer squads for the Covid law-and-order approach, emphasising individual responsibility. 

Whereas some previously ‘hanging-is-too-good-for-em” right-wingers are now sympathetic to rebellion 

From my point of view, you cannot arrest or fine a virus, you can only do that with people and it appears even the police are losing interest in doing that.