Lockdown

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How does a city go from being the worlds most liveable to its most locked down For 262 days, Melbourne was cocooned by stay-at-home orders. Businesses were forcibly closed, classrooms shuttered, and community and social life relegated to an impersonal online world. To stop the spread of a virus, people were prevented from saying goodbye to dying loved ones, children were separated from their parents, and playground equipment was taped off like a crime scene. Through successive COVID winters, the state of Victoria was isolated from the rest of the federation and Melbourne from the rest of the state.

Our remarkable success was to eliminate the virusat least for a timeachieving something no other city had. We kept alive people who otherwise would have died and prevented serious illness in others. As Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews declared when Melbourne emerged from its final, protracted quarantine: We have saved lives, we have kept people safe. But this came at a severe cost, one unlikely to be fully understood for years to come.

From 25 January 2020, the day a man recently arrived from Wuhan walked into the emergency department of a Melbourne suburban hospital and Australia recorded its first case of COVID-19, journalist Chip Le Grand has reported on the pandemic from his home city, detailing the Victorian Governments machinations in response to an unprecedented public health crisis. Lockdown is the story of Melbournes singular pandemic experience, an examination of the decisions taken in pursuit of COVID-zero, and the consequences of those decisions.

Reviews

If you care about the way power is deployed in Australia, evidence-based public health policy and protecting societys most vulnerable, this book is a must-read.

A searingly frank and detailed examination of the pandemic and our response to it.

Le Grand deftly takes us through the complexity, humanity, fear and, at times, irrationality of COVID-zero, and the unintended consequences we must never forget.

A forensic and at times controversial analysis of Melbournes journey with COVID-19, peppered with the scientific, political and personal stories of a very difficult moment in time.

Author Bio

Chip Le Grand is the chief reporter for The Age. He has worked as a journalist with The Australian and The Age newspapers for thirty years, and has spent most of that time writing about the people and politics of Melbourne. During the pandemic, he worked from home with his wife, three teenage children and two large dogs, reporting on the COVID crisis, and at one point wondering how to cook a frozen duck bought in panic when the shelves of his local supermarket were otherwise bare. His previous book, The Straight Dope, an investigation into the Essendon and Cronulla doping scandals, won the Walkley Book Prize and William Hill Australian Sports Book of the Year.