Stage four

... And just after yesterday's post, new news!

With another 671 new covid-19 cases announced today, the city of Melbourne has gone into strict stage four lockdown. This means:

* Curfew from 8pm to 5am.

    We had been finding the 8:30pm walk to be one of the best -- fewer people on the dark sidewalks, possums in the trees, the occasional tawny frogmouth. No more 8:30pm walk for us. We'll manage.

* You can only exercise and shop within a 5km radius of home.

    This doesn't affect us at all. Except for school for Jonathan, none of us have left a 5km radius since March, aside from one quick trip for me to liberate textbooks from my office. Even so, pulling out the map on the newspaper, I found that there are a lot of cool things within a 5km radius of home.

* All high school students across the state back to learning online.

    Yay! This one comes as a relief to me. One more day of school in-person for Jonathan, and then he'll back to his living-room office for six weeks. I know it's more fun with friends, but at least he won't have to wear a mask all day, or take the train, or risk school closures. 80 schools were closed last week because of virus, including the high school where he did the French program two years ago.

* Exercising in groups of no more than two.

    Families with young children are exceptions, but we don't count. We'll have to take turns going out in pairs. Or solo.

* Exercising outside for no more than an hour per day. 

    Sometimes we have been taking two or three long walks each day, for more than an hour total. I guess we'll have to pay more attention to timing.

* One person making one shopping trip at most once per day.

    This was basically us, until last Saturday when Jonathan wanted to check out the vegan food with Tim. Now it will be us again.

Tomorrow, they will announce more restrictions on businesses that can be open, part open, or must close. I'll probably be teaching online during the announcement. Tim may have his own online meetings. I won't be shut in this round, since I'm already fully online. But watch the economy for future closures. My industry (higher education) is being hit hard.

Maybe I will end with a photo of one of the parks less than 5km from home, taken this afternoon.

We live in a good place for a lockdown.