A significant spike in cases and state lockdowns are signals that life has changed. It’s all now on the health system

Anyone watching events on Sunday will know the coronavirus story is now moving so fast it is hard to keep on top of what’s happening.

So let’s keep this simple. Let’s be very clear what happened.

Australia went over a cliff on Sunday. What I mean by this is when we look in the future to write the definitive history of this period, this Sunday will be seen as one of the early tipping points in the story of this pandemic.

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The main thing that happened was a significant spike in the number of coronavirus infections. Australia has now sprinted past 1,000 cases, with the number doubling over each of the past three days, and it is likely this acceleration is only the beginning.

The relentless creep of this pandemic is what is driving the rapid fire reactions of all the governments.

We’ve had a bit of a preamble, and Australia has now crossed the threshold of our new normal. Henceforth, the daily question will be this: can our health system keep up? State governments, who run the hospitals, stand nervously on the frontline of that question.

Infections are accelerating, and too many Australians are failing to heed the public health messages that are designed to stop people dying, either because they don’t trust governments and their messaging, or because the messaging when consumed sporadically is too often confusing and contradictory, or because people aren’t plugged in, or because they think getting sick is something that will happen to someone else.

The heedless display of YOLO on Bondi beach on Friday and Saturday underscores the problem. Culturally, the penny hasn’t dropped yet, because the sun is shining in a sparkling warm Australian autumn, the cafes are open and the surf’s up.

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So on Sunday, Australia’s two most populous states broke ranks. While Scott Morrison was standing in his courtyard in Canberra unveiling a $66bn stimulus package, New South Wales and Victoria crashed in over the top of the prime minister, pointing to imminent school closures, and lockdowns of non-essential services.

Now why did that happen? The short answer is there is a view in these two states that community behaviour won’t shift decisively until the shutdowns start; that people won’t grasp how serious the situation is until there are forced lifestyle changes.

Hot on the heels of that pincer movement from NSW and Victoria were public statements from South Australia and Western Australia – their borders would close from Tuesday – and the ACT followed suit with its shutdown.

Collectively, this was the sound of a sonic boom.

This was the sound of life daily changing, whether we were ready or not. This was the sound of we’ve tried asking nicely for you to engage in social distancing, and given you’ve ignored us, we will have to engineer the outcome.

It was also the sound of a couple of states saying implicitly they don’t believe Canberra is focused enough yet on the health impacts of the crisis. The various moves by the states pre-empted a meeting of the national cabinet. It was supposed to meet early this week. The meeting was brought forward to Sunday night, then at least two premiers brought forward what would be happening on Sunday night.

If anyone had five minutes to think, Sonic Boom Sunday could have been predicted given the range of inputs. The NSW government had a really bad weekend, between the Bondi beach insurrection and the cock-up by local health authorities who apparently allowed a couple of thousand people to walk off a cruise ship without proper health screening. Given the fraying, a forceful corrective was doubtless in order.

Victoria has been increasingly concerned that Morrison has focused relentlessly on trying to avoid an economic shutdown, with catastrophic job losses, and as a consequence isn’t sharp enough on the health impacts.

As well as imposing travel bans and crowd control measures, the federal government has put together three stimulus packages in a fortnight – big, complex undertakings – with the objective of trying to put a flotation device under the national economy. In Canberra it has been all shoulders to the wheel on stimulus design, and on trying to maintain a measure of public confidence, so the country doesn’t descend into full tilt panic.

Obviously both elements of the crisis have to be managed, both are relevant to national wellbeing – but tensions about where the various emphases lie between the tiers of government in Australia have been building slowly within the national cabinet, and its health advisers, over the past 10 days or so.

On Sunday, those deliberative tensions finally broke cover.