I was in a Stage 4 Lockdown and I lived to tell the tale

Melbourne Skyline from the Shrine of Remembrance. Photo Credit: the author

I live in Melbourne. That tiny city in the south-east part of Australia. Recently, Victoria the state where Melbourne is in have come out of one of the strictest lockdown restrictions you will ever hear about.

They called these restrictions, the Stage 4 Lockdown. Very dramatic huh?

What is Stage 4 lockdown like, you ask. Well, let me list the things we COULD do for about 4 months starting last July

1. Only venture within 5 kilometres of our houses. This was termed the restricted bubble.
2. Only get out of our houses for getting provisions (groceries), work for essential workers, exercise, medical reasons and care for the family within an hour only once a day.
3. Socialise only with one person outside our households. We weren’t allowed to mix households.
4. We had to wear masks every time we were out and about (for an hour)
5. We were allowed to get out of the house until 9 PM, then it’s home for everyone until 5 AM.
6. We were remote learning our children — for an entire semester while working from home. If we were the lucky ones to still have work to go to.
7. Daycares, schools, universities, colleges were closed. Everyone was asked to do remote learning. Everyone asked to stay at home with their families 24/7.
8. Shopping centres and restaurants were closed. But we were able to UberEats through the toughest lockdown.

My family is an average one by Melbourne standards. Two children, double-income household living in a quiet suburb away from the city. We were hit with the pandemic financially with salary cuts earlier on the pandemic. But we survived by cutting down on our extra-curricular activities — no sports nor eating out. We had a tight budget for our groceries and we didn’t order online from Amazon every day.

Staying at home wasn’t an issue with us at first. It was a challenge when my youngest child who’s only in kindergarten had to stay home, too. There was no amount of balancing that allowed for attending Zoom meetings while trying to play Lego with a kindergartener. You were either remote schooling or you weren’t. So, the kindergartener learnt a lot of Mathematics from Disney and Netflix. She also expanded her vocabulary by watching some shows that might have been for older children. We knew our priorities.

We don’t have an office space in our modest 3-bedroom house. Which meant we had to convert one of our three common areas as our office. The dining room was the only realistic choice. The living room and the kitchen just had more traffic during the day. My husband and I plonked ourselves at each end of the dining table, he had the north side and I had the south side with our kitchen as my background.

I had videoconference meetings with Octonauts blasting or with my children fighting in the kitchen behind me. Sometimes I would be relegated to the bedroom because my husband’s workmates complained that they could hear more of my meeting than theirs. Then I would be in a meeting and my boss would write over Zoom chat that my husband’s recommendation sounded interesting. Yes, our dining table wasn’t a long one. That or Apple’s headphones have really good microphones.

It was fun filling in time in the evenings and at the weekends at first. There were Netflix shows to binge-watch and chores we’ve been putting off that needed doing. We also discovered a lot of card games, board games and puzzles to entertain the family. We were all taking everything in our stride — most of Melbourne was. Most of us were following all the “rules”. Also, we didn’t want to pay any of the exorbitant fines for not wearing masks, going out of our 5km bubble or fraternising with more than one person outside of our household. Mostly Melbourne was ok with the lockdown and understood why we had to do it. We even started a crush on our Chief Health Officer and called our Premier “DictatorDan” as a term of endearment.

The irritability and the sense of being boxed in became more pronounced. The desire to escape became palpable.

Then at some point, around September right about the sixth-week mark, things started to crack. All of a sudden our kindergartener’s squeals were jarring my soul, and I can’t find anything I wanted to watch on Netflix or Prime anymore. At first, I thought it was these streaming applications’ algorithms being lazy and maybe our little one was just bored, but it kept going. The irritability and the sense of being boxed in became more pronounced. The desire to escape became palpable.

We started to have nothing days when we wouldn’t do anything but sit on our couch as a family and stare at our various screens. We would look up from time to time. My husband and I would glare at each other trying to will the other to get up and make something in the kitchen to feed the hungry brood.

Then it became worse for me. I wouldn’t get out of the house for seven days straight. I started not having any reason to get up from the bed. I stayed there and made sure the bedroom was dark. I would only get out for bathroom breaks, but I will get back to bed and tell my family that I have a migraine. It took a conversation with my GP over Telehealth (yes, we were able to Zoom our doctors, too) to realise what I was experiencing and what my family was experiencing. We were all depressed.

We, quite frankly, got sick of each other and our little house. We wanted a break. I needed psychiatrists and psychologists to get me out of the dark tea-time of my soul. Eventually, after about three weeks I came out of it. My husband never had the therapy that I did, he still thinks he’s fine even though he swears more at other drivers these days.

Our children bounced back from their rut the second DictatorDan announced schools were back. We will see some time in the future how this time has impacted them, I guess.

Today Victoria had a special milestone. We’ve had 28 days straight of zero new cases! This was achieved not only through the Stage 4 Lockdown but also through the high number of free COVID testing stations throughout the state. They even had testing teams knocking at doors, handing over self-testing kits to encourage people to get tested right away. I went to get tested twice and the rest of my family got tested once.

Would I recommend a lockdown for other cities or countries experiencing high number of cases and deaths? Yes. Absolutely yes!

Now, most of the restrictions are easing. I even saw my parents and siblings for the first time in five months last weekend! We are now able to drive more than 25 kilometres from our houses, we only need to wear masks indoors, we can start contact sports, we can mix household — up to 20 together and we can eat out at our cool restaurants and cafes again.

Would I recommend a lockdown for other cities or countries experiencing a high number of cases and deaths? Yes. Absolutely yes! I would rather stay at home than see any of my family or my friends get sick, or worse, die. Nobody said that lockdown was going to be easy, but for Melbourne, we have proven that without a vaccine, isolating and preventing the virus from spreading is the only way.

If there ever was another lockdown, because a third wave is still a possibility until vaccines become widely available, what I would do is be easier on myself and my family. I will definitely not attempt to work five days and still try to spend time with my children. I will encourage my family to have their quality alone time every day. I will read more books. I will sleep more. I might take up another challenge besides writing. Maybe I might take up baking sourdough bread this time.