A road to nowhere: what easing COVID-19 restrictions means for me

Metropolitan Melbourne recently won the saddening honour of the longest number of days in lockdown in the world, right on the back of the roadmap to freedom announced by Premier Dan Andrews. The road out has two lanes and one of them is for people like me, the other is for the majority. 

 I have an autoimmune condition, fibromyalgia, and I don’t like my chances against COVID-19. Part of the condition is a high anti-nuclear antibody level, which translates roughly to “my cells attack themselves when they don’t like what’s going on.” I’ve had my two Pfizer vaccines, I keep to myself, I mask up and sanitise and only leave the house for the minimal essential trips. Even though I live with my wife and our two kids I am lonely and desperately miss my job as a marriage celebrant.

I watch Twitter explode with joy as NSW and Victoria are allowed to start planning picnics. The rules are practically Shakespearean - two households, both alike in vaccine status in metro areas where we lay our scene. Where sourdough and gooey cheese make civil hands unclean. 

The image of elderly, disabled and chronically ill people being shoved out of the way as the able bodied population run to their picnic blankets and laughing selfies is bright and hot in my mind. I like a cheese platter and human company as much as the next guy, but this roadmap excludes me. I read the asterisk of this delicately painted masterpiece, the afterthought: “it’s just a bad flu, except for you. You get the complications, the ventilator, the kids who will probably grow up without you, the wife now without a spouse, the community without a person who was previously there.” 

There’s a shorthand of understanding with chronic iconic folk. We share the fear of being forgotten, the status of the road to nowhere when push comes to shove. None of us want to be collateral damage in the hateful framing of “survival of the fittest.” 

All humans have felt the crushing weight of pressure throughout this pandemic. It brings us to our front doorsteps where we sniff the breeze and bellow while beating our chests – “I matter! I deserve to be free and safe!” and not a single one of us is wrong. We are all telling the truth. 

But this roadmap, it’s an us and them resource. If this pandemic is a wake up call, society is not learning what we need to learn, we are not creating new models and ways of being. The loud, insistent response of “we can’t stay closed, it’s time to open up, we have to live with it” means some of us will die with it. 

Rather than blame and judgement, could we pause and muster some compassion? Instead of the harsh divide, the afterthought asterisk, how about imagining a true community where everyone matters. The nuance, the gentle grey area where the gold is.

A good start would be universal income where people aren’t forced to make decisions that endanger others. A shift worker with a cough that turns out to be COVID-19 won’t have the financial insecurity that causes them to go to work and infect countless people. 

I want to acknowledge that we are all in the same overwhelmed boat here. Most people don’t want to hurt each other, but we find ourselves now beyond our capabilities of rational decision making. I certainly don’t know the answer to this riddle. But to move forward while considering the most vulnerable seems to be a thought that has been pushed out of the way and into the too hard basket. I don’t call that a cause for celebration, or any type of freedom.