Fleeing lockdown? What were you thinking?

If you’re one of those Canberrans who fled the capital to the South Coast as soon as the COVID lockdown was announced, shame on you.

Yesterday afternoon a convoy of vehicles lined the Kings Highway on the way to their coastal bolt holes or hastily booked accommodation to wait out some or all of the seven-day period.

Sure, you may not have been anywhere near the list of contact sites, but that doesn’t mean you haven’t come into contact with someone else who was.

This is delta, super transmissible, a threat to young and old alike, and even in some cases vaccine-resistant.

How will you feel if you start to show symptoms in a few days and realise that due to your selfishness, this dangerous variant has made its way to the South Coast, expanding the virus’s reach?

What part of the ACT Chief Minister Andrew Barr’s message to go home and stay there didn’t you understand?

Why did you feel you were exempted from doing what the rest of Canberra felt obliged to do?

Didn’t you consider what the people of the South Coast might think about a sudden influx of people from the latest COVID hot spot?

When your lot swamped testing sites on the coast when you got down there yesterday, didn’t you realise that your actions undermined the very purpose of the lockdown?

And just because you might be lucky to have a holiday home down there doesn’t make you a local, no matter how much you might say you’re supporting struggling local businesses.

Canberrans had been counting their blessing while the other capitals and regions succumbed to lockdowns, with some even joking that the much-maligned bubble was keeping us safe.

But many of us, and the government, knew that it was becoming harder and harder to avoid the fallout from Sydney where ‘go early, go hard’ has been spurned for a peculiarly NSW approach.

How’s that working for you, Gladys?

Mr Barr wasn’t about to make the same mistake and could not have been any clearer about what Canberrans needed to do.

The only issue is why he left the lockdown until 5:00 pm, giving the entitled plenty of time to beat it to the coast.

OK, there may be practical reasons to give people some reasonable notice, but COVID flight seems to be a recurring theme of lockdown announcements as people flee to safe havens, unaffected areas or other states.

You might even still work from down there, and I bet the laptop was one of the first things packed.

Hell, being a forward-thinking organised Canberran usually relied on to hit your targets, you may have been already kitted up, ready to go when the inevitable happened.

Enjoy your freedom but remember this: it’s not just taking COVID with you that’s possible, you could also bring it back.

All in this together?

Note that some of the ones you left behind have kept their dignity.

The panic shopping that marked yesterday afternoon was ridiculous.

Being told there was no need to stock up seemed only to feed the fervour as frantic shoppers poured into supermarkets, forming long queues.

So you may want to toss an extra pack of loo paper in the 4WD before heading back, just in case.

Original Article published by Ian Bushnell on The RiotACT.