Exclusive National Victoria Coronavirus pandemic

Book extract: On a perfect autumn day,

Brett Sutton sat on the couch in tears.
It was his first big call
Aisha Dow and Melissa Cunningham
June 10, 2023 — 5.00am

Professor Brett Sutton was sitting on his couch at home when he burst into
tears. It was early in the morning on March 13, 2020, and he was exhausted,
having worked through the night liaising with race officials and politicians
about the fate of the Australian Grand Prix.

“I’m not sure I can do this,” the Victorian chief health officer told his wife Kate,
a leader in the humanitarian aid sector.

Several hours earlier, Sutton had received a call from a senior infectious
disease physician at The Alfred hospital, Professor Allen Cheng.

The hospital had just received a test swab belonging to a mechanic for
McLaren – one of the Formula 1 teams due to compete at the grand prix the
following day. It had come back positive for COVID-19.

“He doesn’t give much away, Brett, with what he is thinking, but you could see
that the wheels were turning,” recalled Cheng.

Victoria’s top public health official and his team had an unenviable call to
make: let the grand prix proceed and risk a catastrophic superspreading event,
or call it off with just hours to go, wasting many millions of dollars and
disappointing hundreds of thousands of fans.
“That [night] kind of laid out that there might be thousands of decisions like
that in front of me,” Sutton told us in a January 2023 interview.

But he said that his wife gave him “an appropriate kick in the pants”, and said
that “of course” he would be able to do it.

Melbourne tradie Chris Miles, a Formula 1 fan, said that the most striking
thing about the morning of Friday, March 13 was that it was a perfect autumn
day. It was too lovely, he said, for “anything bad to happen”.

As he rode on a packed tram to the Albert Park track, rumours that the
emerging virus could derail the grand prix were the hot topic of conversation,
but few seemed genuinely concerned.

Waiting spectators are told the Australian Grand Prix is cancelled on the morning of
Friday, March 13, 2020. JOE ARMAO

Miles felt the other fans shared his view that this new disease would go the
way of swine flu, SARS and Ebola, where “nothing really ever turned into
anything” — at least anything that directly impacted his life.
Yet the gates were, surprisingly, still shut when he reached the track’s
entrance. “I remember thinking this is so stupid; they don’t want people to
crowd, but then they have got these huge lines of people waiting.”
Eventually, an official wielding a megaphone emerged to break the news. “The
[Australian Grand Prix Corporation] has been advised by Formula 1 that the
Australian Grand Prix has been cancelled,” he said, looking nervous as he read
off a mobile phone.

Miles, who had been looking forward to a week off work and a busy weekend at
the grand prix, experienced the first hint of a feeling that would grip
Melburnians and other Australians during the years that followed: they didn’t
have anything to look forward to, and life seemed reduced to working – if you
were lucky – and essential tasks.

“The hardest thing for me about the pandemic is I never had anything to look
forward to,” he recalled. “Something I’d really looked forward to for a long
time was suddenly just taken away.”

As news emerged on Friday of Sutton’s resignation as the state’s chief health

officer, after more than four years, few would have been asking why.

Perhaps the better question is how he lasted quite so long, and how he took
himself from the exhausted man on the couch, overwhelmed by the thought of
what was to come, to the resilient face of Victoria’s pandemic response.

Public perceptions of him ranged from a hero to the “silver fox lining of the
pandemic” and, to some, a villain.
Premier Daniel Andrews and Chief Health Officer Brett Sutton at a COVID-19 briefing in
August 2020. WAYNE TAYLOR

“I wasn’t much attached to either the adulation or the vitriol. I think it is

always going to happen in a crisis, to an extent, where you’re a focal point of
people’s attention, and where the decisions do sit with you,” Sutton said.

For close to two years, Sutton was arguably the most powerful and
recognisable public figure in the state, short of Premier Daniel Andrews. He
signed off on every one of Victoria’s six lockdowns, spanning a cumulative 262
days.
Despite spending hours talking through each health direction and every
potential outcome in granular detail with many dozens of his colleagues,
Sutton said he felt very alone as he put his signature to orders.

“It was a precautionary approach,” he said. “But the general feeling was about
how you needed to act when the early signs looked catastrophic, and the
potential was inconceivable in many respects.”

Melbourne’s second lockdown was heralded as a “social and economic disaster”

for the city and the state. “Sicktoria locked down for round two” blared a
headline in Brisbane’s Courier-Mail the next day.

There had been a fleeting window of freedom when Victorians could see their
families again or go for a beer at the pub, only for the return to normality to be
snatched away. There was collective grief when it became apparent that the
new surge of cases would become another wave, and not simply a speed bump
on the path back to life as before.
Sutton told us that Victoria’s second wave of coronavirus cases had crept up on
authorities, as it was hidden in the tail end of the first. “We couldn’t see there
were new chains of transmission that were taking off in the way that they
were,” he said.

“I wish I’d acted sooner, because it would have made the scale of the challenge
so much less.

Sutton speaks to the media in May 2021. GETTY IMAGES

“There were so many hard lessons like that which came after the fact about
what it means not to act for a day or for a week … it means several weeks of
pain and hardship and suffering, and more deaths and more disability.”
As the COVID count kept rising – 165 cases a day, 238 cases, 459 cases – there
was heartache for Sutton being with his family physically but not
psychologically as he tucked his young children into bed at night.
“In many respects, I didn’t have a moment to contemplate how I could manage
myself,” he reflected.

“I wasn’t thinking of it. I was thinking of all of the things that were playing
out, that needed to be decided, the hundreds of emails, text messages,
conversations and meetings that were happening every day, essentially
through all of 2020.”

When Sutton took his first day off in months on the anniversary of his father’s
death, it would happen to coincide with the day that Victoria reported its
highest number of deaths in the second wave.

His father, Terry, had died from a stroke when Sutton was nine years old. His
death affected him deeply as a boy, to the point that Sutton was later
diagnosed as being in “profound shock” by the family’s GP.

Terry’s death became a catalyst for Sutton studying medicine. “I was in my own
head for a lot of that day [the anniversary], and it was particularly tough, as I
recall,” Sutton said.

There were countless other difficult days, too, in the emotionally charged
months of the pandemic, when chief health officers suddenly became caught in
the crossfire of politics. Sutton struggled to contain his anger after a television
crew arrived at his doorstep during the lockdown of 2020, his daughter
answering the door in her pyjamas.

By August 2021, there was a point where roughly 15 million Australians were
back in lockdown as several states fought incursions of the Delta strain.
Melbourne went into its sixth shutdown on August 5. It was only meant to last
seven days. Instead, it stretched to 77.
A deserted Bourke Street Mall during Melbourne’s fifth lockdown in July 2021. JUSTIN
MCMANUS

“It’s now clear to us that we are not going to drive these numbers down – they
are instead going to increase,” Daniel Andrews said on September 1, 2021.

The declaration that the state would no longer pursue “COVID zero” was an
emotional moment for many Victorians who had sacrificed so much, again and
again, to eradicate outbreaks. But whenever Sutton has contemplated the
alternative – a less restrictive approach that did not rely heavily on lockdowns,
and allowed for transmission to circulate – he has always come back to what it
could have meant, not only for Victoria but the rest of the country.
“Clearly, it was impossibly hard, and clearly it harmed populations, and it
harmed individuals economically, psychologically [and] physically because of
the constraints on our movements, and the constraints on our freedoms and
the limit on our interactions,” Sutton said.

Without the restrictions imposed on Victorians, he said that COVID would

have breached the borders of other states, irrespective of closures. “I think
there would have been another 30,000 or 40,000 deaths in Australia because
they couldn’t have contained it to Victoria.”

What might surprise many Australians, and rankle others, is that sweeping
lockdowns and international border closures were never part of the plan.

According to the Australian Health Management Plan for Pandemic Influenza,

there were several measures that authorities could call on in the inevitable
scenario that the nation was faced with a new pandemic. Social distancing was
among them, but school closures, workplace shutdowns and bans on mass
gatherings were generally not recommended, unless the pandemic was at the
more serious end of the scale.

The plan certainly didn’t envisage a scenario in which people were only
allowed to leave their homes for a small number of essential reasons, nor did it
foresee anything close to monitored, 14-day quarantine.
Professor James McCaw, who helped develop the pandemic plan, said that if
anyone had asked him prior to COVID-19 if forcing people to stay in an
organised quarantine facility for two virus incubation periods would stop the
disease getting in the country, his answer would have been yes.

But this measure wasn’t written into the plan because it was thought it would
be unacceptable to the community, and therefore not palatable for politicians.
It was the same with lockdowns.

Sutton told us that officials and experts were prompted to rethink their
assumptions as they looked beyond Australia and saw hospital systems
straining under coronavirus cases and the rationing of intensive-care beds in
Italy’s Lombardy region. Millions of Italians were locked down in early March.

Then there was China, which by the end of February was beginning to drive
cases down through lockdowns. That suggested it might be possible to gain
some control over the virus.

Sutton said officials around the globe moved from the assumption that the
Western world could never contemplate the idea of a lockdown to believing it
might be the thing required to address the extraordinary challenge they were
facing.

“I think Italy demonstrated that (a) it was necessary, and (b) it was something
that the population was prepared to go to as a measure to deal with what was
an overwhelming situation,” he said.
It was not expected that lockdowns
and international traveller quarantine
would temporarily eliminate the
disease from the community.

Several leading public health experts

say the initial success of these radical
measures left them grappling with a
strange if not unwelcome quandary:
What now?
This is an edited extract from Life
As We Knew It: the extraordinary
story of Australia’s pandemic, by
Age journalists Aisha Dow and
Melissa Cunningham. It’s available
for pre-order with Scribe:

Life as We Knew It, by Age journalists

Aisha Dow and Melissa Cunningham,
explores Australia’s experience of the
COVID-19 pandemic. It’s out in October.
SCRIBE

https://scribepublications.com.au/books-authors/books/life-as-we-knew-
it-9781761380037.

Aisha Dow is health editor with The Age and a former city reporter. Connect via Twitter
or email.

Melissa Cunningham is a reporter at The Sunday Age. Connect via Twitter or email.