As for compliance, I see widespread low level breaching, from people who rigidly obeyed it six months ago.
Data point - my 87 year old mum, fully vaxxed is not following the rules closely this time. She is seeing my household officially as her singles bubble (we both have 1 AZ and due for 2nd in 2 weeks and 4 weeks respectively). But she is also seeing my 59 year old sister (also with 1 AZ), which is outside the current lockdown rules for ACT. She is avoiding her grandchildren -all in their 30s and only one of them (in the ADF) with any shots yet. The other three are booked in for Pfiiiiiizer in early September, and she is also avoiding her 2 infant great-grandchildren. More for fear of her infecting them than the other way around. It is definitely the younger households that are more vulnerable this time. As soon as they are shot up, she plans to see them too.
She is suffering consequences of a serious melanoma and is realistic that she may not have much longer to go. She says that family is everything, and the only thing she really has left, and she is willing to take the risk that we partially vaccinated ones infect her given it’s a low risk as she is fully vaccinated. And she said it is our call if we want to take the risk that she infects us who are not yet fully shot up. Given the reality of how an ill, elderly woman lives, she is no risk to us at all, or to the community. We shop for her (allowed). She does Telehealth appointments. We get her prescriptions for her (allowed). We pop in and have a cup of coffee and a chat with her, take her for a turn in the garden (not allowed - ACT does not recognise this as essential care). We invite her over for a meal to be sure she eats something other than cheese on toast (allowed for us as her singles bubble, but not for my sister who does it too, at mum’s request). She sees no one except us family members. All her other enjoyments in life have been stripped from her - seniors gym closed, no coffee with her friends and neighbours, no visits to the national library to pursue her passion for family history, could not attend her U Tas graduation held last week, no visits from her grandchildren, great-grandchildren, and her other surprisingly wide network of young friends - children and grandchildren of people she knows. Her life is very small and very constrained. Thank God she is not in residential aged care, where things would be so stultifying, I reckon she would just give up.
When law-abiding people like my mum and goody two-shoes girls like me stop complying, it’s fairly clear that the government has lost the support of a wide slab of the populace. The rules are harsh and simplistic, and no wonder people have stopped listening. The governments, all of them, are speaking from a position of very diminished moral authority.
Edited to fix up my emotional typos so you can understand what I was meaning.
