Five years on from the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic and its subsequent lockdowns and disruption across the globe, The Weekly’s Samantha Trenoweth shares her and others’ experiences of the day the world stopped.
It was Monday, February 3, 2020, around 10pm. The phone rang and rang and Toby, my partner of 30 years, only just caught the call before it rang out. He’d been struggling through heart failure for a decade and had been added to the transplant list a week earlier. The doctors had said not to get his hopes up – it could take years to find a heart that matched. But here it was. He had two hours to report to the hospital.
Driving across town that night, smoke from the Black Summer bushfires still hung in the air but the news on the radio was that a deadly Chinese virus had crossed our border. On the day of Toby’s transplant, there were four confirmed cases of COVID-19 in Australia. When he was released from hospital two weeks later (on a hefty dose of immunosuppressant drugs), there were 22. Soon after, the numbers soared.
On doctors’ advice, our family adopted COVID precautions early, but by March, face masks were the accessory du jour, and we all felt like we were careening down a mountainside on bicycles with no brakes. COVID-19 moved fast. Australia placed travel restrictions on foreign nationals entering from China, then Iran, then South Korea and Italy. But the horse had bolted. We later learned that the virus had been circulating unnoticed in Europe since September 2019. On March 11, the World Health Organisation (WHO) declared a pandemic.
Dr Priya Nair had been holidaying in Portugal. She returned in early March to growing concern at St Vincent’s Hospital in Sydney that staff should prepare for the worst.
“We just made it back before the borders closed,” the Director of Intensive Care tells The Weekly. “It was fortunate we did, because we hit the ground running.
“We were pretty much on the fly, having to come up with new protocols … The things nature controlled – like how virulent the virus was – weren’t the things that worried me. The things that kept me awake were the things that we could get wrong … For example, a healthcare worker catching COVID because they didn’t have the right protection, or it wasn’t worn properly, or we did something to a patient that we could have done differently. The avoidable things worried me.”
“The things that kept me awake were the things we could get wrong.”
Dr Priya Nair
At first, the focus was on increasing bed capacity in intensive care, not just at St Vincent’s but around the country.
“Certainly that was required,” she admits, “but as time passed, human resources were the real limitation. You can convert almost any area into a ward with ventilators, but you also need trained nurses and doctors.” And as doctors, nurses and carers went down with COVID, that became a critical issue.
Catching COVID on the Ruby Princess almost cost Michael his life
In the first week of March, a worker at Dorothy Henderson Lodge – an aged-care facility in Macquarie Park, Sydney – tested positive for COVID. Six residents died from the virus within the month, and the home was closed to visitors as it became Australia’s first COVID cluster.
Three-quarters of all Australian COVID deaths in 2020 were aged-care residents – in part because of their frailty and co-morbidities; and in part because of the close quarters in which they lived. As infectious diseases and bioethics expert Professor Lyn Gilbert pointed out, the lockdowns came with additional risks.
“Residents were confined to their rooms and visitors excluded,” she wrote in The Conversation. “Family members were often unable to communicate with loved ones for weeks. Staff who were infected – or close contacts – were replaced by ‘surge’ workers, many of whom had no experience in aged care or infection control. Many residents became depressed, confused, or deconditioned from lack of exercise.” Precious moments with family at the end of their lives were lost.
“Residents were cconfined to their rooms and visitors excluded. Family members were often unable to communicate with loved ones for weeks.”
Professor Lyn Gilbert
On March 18, the Governor-General declared a “human biosecurity emergency” and as if to prove his point, just one day later, the Ruby Princess docked in Sydney Harbour. Every one of the ship’s 2700 passengers was permitted to disembark freely, some catching flights to destinations around Australia. Passengers were asked to isolate for 14 days, but on their way home to do that, they made contact with thousands of people.
Within weeks, 342 COVID cases had been confirmed among Ruby Princess passengers, including Michael and Ann Smith. They’d booked the trip with two of their dearest friends to celebrate Michael’s 60th birthday. They were barely symptomatic when they tested positive two days after flying home to Perth. A week later, Michael was in an induced coma, on a ventilator in Intensive Care. He suffered two heart attacks over the 55 days he remained there. And while he was fighting for his life, one of the close friends he’d travelled with lost his battle with COVID.
There were times when the doctors weren’t sure Michael would make it. “The day I left the ward to go into rehab, they did a guard of honour,” Michael tells The Weekly, “and when I was discharged, all the staff – from cleaners to the nurses and doctors – were there.”
Today Michael has severe scarring on his lungs and has been forced to take early retirement from his career as a paediatric mental health nurse. His plans to spend his later years travelling overseas with Ann have been curtailed, but he volunteers in his local community and is seeing Australia, on a series of driving holidays, instead of the world.
Lockdowns and home-schooling
By the end of April 2020, entertainment venues had closed, social distancing was enforced and, where possible, we’d been asked to work from home. Homeschooling had begun in Victoria. Nationally, there have been 6753 cases and 91 deaths from COVID and there was no vaccine or cure in sight.
When Toby went back for his 12-week check-up, the hospital had been reconfigured in anticipation of an influx of highly contagious patients. There were new protocols – masks, sanitiser, social distancing – “but there was also,” he says, “a tense wariness amongst the staff because, in a clinic full of heart patients, every person who walked in was potentially lethal.”
“There was also a tense wariness amongst the staff because , in a clinic full of heart patients, every person who walked in was potentially lethal.”
Toby Creswell
It wasn’t just our family in lockdown now. We watched Italians sing arias from balconies and the Brits applauded NHS workers on Thursday evenings at eight. We saw American COVID victims buried in mass graves on Hart Island. There had been 1.6 million recorded cases and 97,000 deaths globally.
The Australian Government implemented tough restrictions on both inward and outward-bound travel in its quest for “COVID-zero”. We had officially cut ourselves off from the world. State border restrictions had begun in late March, and the airline industry plummeted.
A pilot’s COVID story
James Dale had always wanted to be a pilot. As a toddler, he’d zoomed around the house with outstretched arms for wings. He’d had some extraordinary jobs, as a skydiving pilot on the Sunshine Coast, island hopping through the Pacific, flying to remote communities and cattle stations in the Northern Territory. “I got to see some amazing things for a city boy,” he says.
Then, finally, he scored his dream job with Qantas two years before the pandemic. He flew the Airbus A330 on long-haul routes, then trained on the Boeing 737 to fly domestically. He finished that training just three days before he was stood down. “It was nerve-racking,” he says. “It felt like we were facing a complete unknown.”
His wife, Lucy, an ICU paediatric nurse, was seven months pregnant and they had just bought their first home. James was worried about the family’s finances but, in retrospect, he says, he’s grateful for those first few months of the stand-down. “I got to spend that time with my beautiful wife before our daughter was born. I could focus on Charlotte’s birth, and we were very lucky that I could still be there for that.” But then he had to find work.
A local builder took him on as a labourer, then he worked in disability care. Finally, James found work at a cattle station out of Rockhampton, and the family of three moved north.
“I got to experience things I’d never done before,” James says, “like driving a big ’dozer, mustering, fencing, feeding cattle. We were bathing Charlotte in the old cattle troughs, as you do. We met such beautiful souls out there.”
They stayed until the call came through from his manager: Qantas wanted him back in the sky.
“We met such beautiful souls out there.”
James Dale
Today James helps run a pilots’ mentorship program, and he is First Officer on the 737. Looking back, he thinks living through the turbulence of COVID has given pilots, stewards and ground crew a common bond.
“‘What did you do through COVID?’ On the flight deck, it’s still the topic of conversation,” James says. “And it’s incredible, what people did to support their families. Sharing our stories has brought us closer, and it’s made us realise how lucky we are to do this job.”
What did we learn from COVID?
Dr Nair thinks COVID has also brought the medical community closer. She points out that the development of a vaccine before the end of 2020 was the result of unprecedented cooperation amongst the notoriously competitive international scientific community. The fastest development of a vaccine prior to that had taken four years.
Vaccines began to roll out in Australia in February 2021, and in spite of criticism that the government had acted slowly, by December that year, 42,598,706 doses had been given. By then, more than seven billion doses of the vaccine had been delivered worldwide.
Dr Nair believes the initial hard border closure was not a mistake. “The virus was very virulent,” she says, “and at the time we had no vaccination, we had no antivirals. People who were otherwise well were becoming critically ill.”
That said, there were regulatory tragedies. The lockdowns in Melbourne Housing Commission towers were deemed “justified” by the Victorian Ombudsman. But she added that the haste with which they were enforced was “incompatible with residents’ human rights”.
While teachers made superhuman efforts to bridge gaps, the kids who could afford it least were often left behind by homeschooling. And there were borders that closed so tightly they prevented too many Australians from holding the hands, in sickness and in death, of those they loved.
There were rifts in the community at the height of COVID too. Conspiracy theories took on lives of their own and pro- and anti-vax sentiment divided families. But there were also Sikh kitchens pumping out free food for those doing it tough; teddies in windows to lift kids’ spirits; scrub choirs in hospitals and couch choirs online; and neighbours checking on neighbours, including Toby when he finally came down with COVID in 2022 (it was a tough, four-week-long bout but he made it through).
Dr Nair says that COVID-19 not only changed the way she works, it changed the way she sees the world.
“I value the place I work and the colleagues I work with a lot more,” she explains, “because I saw them in those really dark days. How they stuck together, and looked after each other. Some surgeons had less work, so they came to help us. And I think nurses make the difference to our health system, with their compassion and skill. All that gave me a lot of faith in humanity. Now I see there’s good in people that come to the fore when you need it.
“I realise how temporary life is as well. I think, you value what you have, you value every day because you just don’t know what’s around the corner. That’s the other thing which COVID made me realise: How fragile life is.”
In February 2022, Australia’s borders reopened to the world, but COVID remains with us. It would be wonderful to think some of those lessons had remained with us also.
This article originally appeared in the March 2025 issue of The Australian Women’s Weekly. Pick up the current on-sale issue at your local newsagents or subscribe so you never miss an issue.
