Considerable distress and anger were triggered in and around Huskisson when the closure of wildginger restaurant was announced. Unaware they had been linked to a Sydney cluster, a visitor from the city had dined there and later tested positive to COVID-19.
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According to NSW Health, the visitor had done the right thing immediately they knew of the link. They isolated, they got tested.
But that is not the point. Day after day, the NSW Premier has begged, cajoled and threatened people to take the COVID resurgence seriously. She has repeatedly asked them to wear masks when out and to avoid unnecessary travel.
Perhaps it's time to pull up the drawbridge and reimpose restrictions on travel to the regions. Maybe, too, masks should be made mandatory. Certainly, a lot of our readers think that's the case.
Unless we all make smart choices, we should expect the virus to spread. Those smart choices include asking ourselves whether that weekend trip is absolutely necessary, whether the reunion with a group of friends from far and wide is a good idea at this point in time. We need to flatten the curve and that means getting ahead of it as individuals.
We should not be framing decisions around the selfish calculus of what we can get away with but rather asking if there is more we can do to slow the spread.
We saw the latter in Batemans Bay when the COVID cluster from the Soldiers Club emerged. Businesses voluntarily shut down even though they weren't obliged to, some restaurants imposed their own takeaway-only restrictions and clubs temporarily turned away non-local visitors.
These decisions came at considerable cost but the reckoning was the short term pain was better than the potentially far worse consequences of not acting.
After watching the train wreck that is Victoria, we know the ramifications of stupid behaviour. Constant pleading by Premier Dan Andrews in the early days of the resurgence seemed to fall on deaf or wilfully defiant ears. And even after extreme lockdown was imposed we saw incredibly irresponsible acts, many of which were inexplicably posted to social media.
NSW is poised to go down the same path if people don't stop thinking somehow, miraculously, the guidelines, rules and plain old commonsense don't apply to them.
We all have to begin thinking less selfishly and be a lot smarter.
