What else could explain the confounding directives delivered by our PM? With an "abundance of caution" he enacted a blanket ban on non-essential gatherings of over 500 people on Monday. But, he said, he'll still go to the footy this weekend. By dinner time he had changed his mind. A spokesman saying he had originally planned to watch the Sharks play to make it "very clear" that the medical advice from experts to ban mass gatherings had not taken immediate effect. That worked well. The federal government has come down with a bad case of chronic inconsistent messaging. It’s understandable – there are a lot of bugs going around. In the midst of a public health crisis of pandemic proportions, the prognosis is not rosy. Clear public health advice is central to pandemic preparedness and community response. It’s all the more important in democratic countries where we don’t take kindly to being told what to do without very good reason, and preferably by choice.

Australians won't stomach the same level of extreme societal control implemented by China and South Korea to flatten the curve of transmissions. When our political leaders, our chief medical and health officers explain that this is an evolving situation, that they are working from pandemic plans created and revised over many years, and that they are taking advice from public health experts, we understand the imperative of changing circumstances and adapting plans. The federal government has come down with a bad case of chronic inconsistent messaging. We can understand that these plans have in-built flexibility. They can be scaled up or down meet the challenges of an epidemic. And for the most part this has been communicated. But the slip-ups have cut-through. What happens on Monday to warrant the banning of mass gatherings that won’t affect a stadium of spectators on Saturday night? What kind of virus discriminates between essential and non-essential events?

Australia was 'ahead of the curve' when it came to 'flattening the curve' of coronavirus transmission, Morrison says, with our early travel bans and rapid identification of cases and contact tracing. And biosecurity experts, virologists and epidemiologists understood the government’s actions. They made sense because they were in line with carefully prepared pandemic plans. But the mixed messaging has left many aghast. Flabbergasted, even. There was that unhelpful reprimand of a GP who treated patients after unknowingly contracting the virus, tarnishing the cooperation of the healthcare workers we are sorely going to need if community transmission converges with the flu season. There was the weekend press conference in which Health Minister Greg Hunt outlined who should seek testing, which left too much room for interpretation and contributed to a run on clinics and pathology labs, and the intermittent crashing of the Healthdirect hotline. There’s also a normalcy bias in Mr Morrison's weekend plans (now cancelled). Sure it might be okay for a healthy man in a box seat to practice social distancing at the footy. What about the elderly fans in stadiums?