With lockdown, a new coronavirus variant and vaccine shambles, we're hanging by a thread this week.

Extract from ABC News

Analysis

By Virginia Trioli

Posted 1hour ago

In Victoria we are of course tired of being asked to go into lockdown all over again — but we do it.

(AAP: James Ross)

If you're seeing something here right now — then yay me!

For an interminable, painful and unique length of time yesterday I sat staring at the white space between the words you are now reading, wondering what I could share with you this morning. Something. Anything.

The hours rolled on.

Sentences started.

Then deleted.

How about something on the exquisitely programmed Rising festival in Melbourne, heartbreakingly abandoned under a blood moon as the city went into lockdown, only for the foxes to creep out at night and take it over?

Or maybe something on Love on the Spectrum? And the complex and differing views within the autistic community about whether and how we should see into the lives of young adults trying to make the kind of meaningful connections that neurotypicals certainly don't get right.

I'd start writing — and then I'd stop.

I'd get distracted by more information trickling out about the Delta COVID variant now discovered in Melbourne; by a call from my husband telling me that the lovely Italian deli from which we got almost all of our last lockdown food was ominously closed this time around.

Start again. And then a call from a friend in Sydney, infuriated by the complacency she is seeing in that city — few people using QR codes, people walking in and out — "like they own the place!" — and even being told by one city cafe owner when she asked for the check-in code "Oh, we're not doing that."

"It will happen here too," she said of the Victorian outbreak. She had just returned from the Sunshine Coast, where people shrugged about the virus and simply said that it was something that really had nothing to do with them. Would they get vaccinated? "Yeah," said one, "Maybe. Not sure when."

The threads disappear

Last week I wrote about the confluence of apathy, complacency, government inaction, disorganisation and missteps that have led us to a place that some intensivists now describe as a possible tipping point.

But we have also seen incredible community strength, commitment to a public health measure, compliance and engagement with testing and vaccination that is deeply inspiring. In Victoria we are of course tired of being asked to do that all over again — but we do it. And this community is phenomenal when it's asked to dig in yet again.

But this time I'm finding it hard to pull all the threads together. In the middle of extended lockdown Mark IV, I guess I would.

I read that after a very slow start of planning and consulting and carefully informing the community, Japan has finally started vaccinating and is doing so at the rate of 500,000 people a day.

That India's infection rates are falling fast, even while the new variant from there poses a threat to our complacency here that I suspect few have ever considered.

Long lines and waiting are better than no access to a vaccine in a group home.

(ABC News: Oliver Gordon)

That the disability service Scope plans to roll out its own mass vaccination program in the absence of a well organised federal one, and a mum with an adult autistic son, after waiting weeks for him to be vaccinated in his group home, does the hardest thing — the thing she dreaded — and takes him all the way to the Royal Exhibition Centre's mass hub.

There, they usher her to the front of the queue, take them in and find a quiet room in which her son can recover. She is close to tears of gratitude when she tells me her story.

That many are struggling to get through on the vaccination booking lines; but others talk of the fabulous system they see when they finally get to a hub.

I pull the threads together, and then they come away in my hands. I wanted these to be the last days of the pandemic, our final push to the finish line. But I don't know if they are. Instead, time seems to loop backward and forward — to when we started this, to when it seemed it was ending — and it's hard to find the end of the rope.

This too shall pass

So, I do what I always do when times get like this. I leash the dog — a relative newcomer to our house called Cora, whose head and backside swing enthusiastically in opposite directions every time she sees me — I grab the men of the house and we walk to the park, under still, dark skies and watch the possums scatter in terror as a ferocious black Labrador pads eagerly towards them.

I think about the installations of Rising waiting for us to reclaim them, and I cross my fingers for the little bars and cafes and restaurants that blaze with life in my city and that I pray will again.

I see the moon waning in the sky and know it will start to thicken again. I know that this too shall pass. But I wish with more fervour than I've ever felt before that it does soon.

Like many, I'll find comfort, joy and something thrilling in good reads this weekend, and we have some marvellous ones to add to your list. We have kd lang's brilliant reflection on making her peace with the disappearing muse, a guide to identifying online trolling and Sarah Ferguson's magnificent investigation into the lived trauma of Donald Trump's immigrant family separation policy. It's a bloody great bit of TV, too.