Covid 19 coronavirus: Heather du Plessis-Allan on the extended lockdown - will we comply?

COMMENT:

Tell you what, I'm not convinced how compliant Aucklanders will be this time around.

Already, we've witnessed Aucklanders fleeing the city to the Coromandel and Queenstown despite direct instructions to stay put in order to keep Covid out of other regions.

Anecdotally, people are less inclined to follow all the rules this time around.

It wouldn't be surprising if this happened given the way it played out in Victoria for its second lockdown. First time, it worked okay. Then Covid came back via the border and during the second lockdown there was a huge amount of rule-breaking. Even if they were Covid-positive, people were going to work.

The concept of lockdown fatigue here is being discussed by academics already.

Mostly they're confident we will be more co-operative than other parts of the world. Their argument is we've had a taste of a Covid-free life so we know if we work together we can get there again and that will incentivise rule-following.

But then, didn't Victoria also? Didn't its population go back to a relatively normal life and still not follow the rules second time around?

People social distancing at Takapuna Beach as Auckland deals with Covid-19 alert level 3 restrictions. Photo / Dean Purcell

Our problem might be, and this is something Christopher Gale, a senior lecturer in psychiatry at the University of Otago, has pointed to, the mental effort to rise to the challenge of another lockdown.

We know how hard this will be and how long it could end up being.

Probably we need to accept the efficacy of these lockdowns diminishes every time we turn to them. Really, a lockdown is something to be done once and then not again.