I’m a little bit surprised by the level of anger at people who’ve broken the rules this past weekend.

We now know 191 people breached level 3 rules over the weekend.  In total police received 1200 public complaints.  And total breaches during level 3 are now at nearly 600.

Wasn’t this entirely predictable?

I’d put it down to three things: what we were told to expect, the severity of these restrictions, and the low case numbers.

Originally, we were told we were going into a lockdown for four weeks.  We are now about to start week seven.  That’s a communications mistake.  It means people were never mentally prepared to last this long in lockdown.

Compare it to Australia.  They went into lockdown three days after us.  They were told to prepare for six months of restrictions. They’ve now been told they’re probably coming out of lockdown this week.

And while it might’ve been possible for us to handle a longer lockdown if it wasn’t so restrictive, this complete social shutdown has been really difficult for people.

Add to all of this the fact that disaster hasn’t arrived.  We’ve cleared our hospitals for Covid cases that haven’t flooded in.  That’s obviously a good thing.  But it’s hard to maintain compliance when you’ve got consistently low case numbers.  Thursday 3, Friday 3, Saturday 6, Sunday 2.

If you think this weekend was bad for compliance, what do you think zero cases today is going to do?

The truth we shouldn’t be in level 3 anymore and it’s obvious.

These numbers tell us that.  The government’s own criteria tells us that. It says level three is necessary if there’s community transmission, and there is none according to Ashley Bloomfield.

Some health experts are also telling us we shouldn’t’ be in level 3 anymore. Given these numbers, they say there must be some reason we’re not being told for us remaining in level 3.  The suspicion is that the contact tracing system still isn’t up to scratch.

But, it’s abundantly obvious that we’re locked down now unnecessarily and that is likely part of the reason for the breaches at the weekend and why we shouldn’t be surprised.  People aren’t stupid