'There’s so much mental stress. You are quarantining in your house, but when you have two kids who are full-time students and your husband has to work, who will do all the work at home?” covid covid19 lockdown pandemic coronavirus
Ingrid Goldstein* considers herself lucky. She recently survived cancer, holds a secure job with a top-tier city law firm and lives next door to her parents, which has its perks in a global pandemic.
But February’s circuit-breaker came after what was then among the longest and toughest continuous COVID-19 shutdowns in the world: the brutal four months of restrictions imposed by the Andrews government between June and October last year as it tried to quell an outbreak, sparked by its botched hotel quarantine scheme, which led to the deaths of 768 people.
And then there’s the nature of the virus itself: an Indian variant of COVID-19, dubbed “Kappa”, that Victorian Chief Health Officer Brett Sutton described as “an absolute beast” because “it has moved faster than any other strain we’ve dealt with”., the fear of a speed of transmission we’d never seen before added to the anxiety many Victorians felt.
“It’s not just financial – there’s so much mental stress,” she says. “You are quarantining in your house, but when you have two kids who are full-time students and your husband has to work, who will do all the work at home?”Across town, cafe store manager Bryden Vasquez is somewhat more upbeat. The 24-year-old also had his own COVID scare last week, when he discovered he had been at an exposure site in Brunswick at exactly the same time as an infected person.
Monash University professor of psychiatry Jayashri Kulkarni said the feeling was a little different around this lockdown.Jason South
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