It’s our last full day. We’re packing and we have to do some serious cleaning of the apartment (although I warned the owner that it won’t be sanitized). Judie has gone into her office to drop some stuff off, have a conference call with Hong Kong and pick up anything she left there. Our flight to San Francisco tomorrow is definitely happening, so we will be back in America tomorrow (Tuesday) morning. The bad news is that our flight to Newark has been cancelled, which is kind of predictable. So we are scrambling around with United trying to change our booking. Once we get to California, we’ll get home one way or another, even if I have to rent car and drive! (I’m sure it won’t come to that.)

Meanwhile, hours after I posted my last note, the PM and the federal government finally realized that they had to do something. The States were all taking different actions and were way out ahead of Morrison, which was (or at least should have been) politically embarrassing. And having a scattershot approach makes no sense in dealing with a nationwide pandemic like this. (Someone might want to tip Donald off to this fact.) So a complete lockdown was announced to begin at noon on Monday (today). Pubs, gyms, casinos, nightclubs, theaters and entertainment venues of all kinds are closed indefinitely. Restaurants and cafes can stay open, but only for takeout and delivery. Schools are open for now. The Morrison government (and the press, which is shockingly, mostly controlled by Murdoch) is blaming young people for not taking their social distancing recommendations seriously and is hinting around that if you don’t like the lockdown, blame them. Ridiculous and more that bit Trumpian.

They probably should have done all this a week or more ago, although the outbreak is still relatively mild here, despite the government allowing a cruise ship to land at Circular Quay last week and disgorge thousands of passengers, who then dispersed throughout the country or flew back to somewhere else. Of course, a number of them tested positive, leading to a scandal. It actually smells like a payoff to someone.

This morning the government ramped up for a huge increase in online applications for unemployment benefits (which has some other, odd name here). Good idea, but some jerk hacked the government website where you sign up so that very few people could actually get through. It is hard to imagine why someone would do that. The government has extended the period to apply and will make applications retroactive. UPDATE: It turned out that there was no cyber attack. The PM’s buddy, who is the Minister in charge of this, just made it up when confronted over the collapse of the website due to lack of planning. He was forced to recant later in the day.

An indication of how this economic contagion spreads: David Lee’s old printing business is now his tenant and they are looking for a break on their rent from him. They told him that have lost hundreds of thousands of dollars of orders from tourist businesses (no foreigners allowed in the country for the foreseeable future) and even tens of thousands from a couple of gyms.

Manly Beach is pretty deserted. There aren’t even that many surfers. (And remember, they are people who get shots so that they continue to surf even when the e coli in the water has reached dangerous levels.) Judie reported that there were five or ten riders on her ferry this morning.

I will say that it all makes it a lot easier to go home. When everything was near-normal here and America was filled with huddled masses yearning to get out of their houses, it was possible to think that staying here was a decent option. But if we are going to be locked indoors for while either way, I ‘d much rather be in Montclair.

I’ll probably continue this blog for a little while when we return, since we will have to self-quarantine for 14 days and I never got around to telling the stories about this trip that I wanted to tell (or at least write down for my own enjoyment).