Not many people knew it, but August 20, 2021, was the final morning Shepparton would wake up without a confirmed coronavirus case. Every day since then, the virus has been in the city. Max Stainkamph speaks to some of the movers and shakers about their — and his — memories of the day.
On the morning of August 20, Shepparton was on edge.
The official figures might not have shown it, but coronavirus was in Shepparton — with a third wastewater detection in the past few weeks announced on Thursday.
Goulburn Valley Health chief executive Matt Sharp woke up that week expecting Shepparton to record an official case at some point.
He didn’t expect Friday to be the last time Shepparton would ever sit at zero coronavirus cases and, at the end of the day, see more than 10,000 people in isolation.
Greater Shepparton Secondary College principal Barbara O’Brien didn’t expect to spend most of the day orchestrating the movement of 2000 students home within the space of hours.
Then mayor Kim O’Keeffe didn’t expect to be jumping into the driver’s seat of the city’s response and to be the public face of the city for the nation.
Then deputy mayor Rob Priestly didn’t expect to be throwing himself into efforts to bring people food, medicine and more.
Reporters at the News — your humble correspondent included — weren’t expecting to have one of the busiest days in the paper’s history.
And the people of Shepparton weren’t expecting their city to be plunged into a coronavirus outbreak, with thousands thrown into 14 days of quarantine without warning.
But we were.
August 20 had arrived.
And although we didn’t know it, it would change Shepparton forever — for better and worse.
***
Mr Sharp knew something was looming. For days there had been wastewater detections and reminders for people to come forward.
Coronavirus — and the Delta strain — had arrived in Shepparton, but they didn’t know where.
“The fact no-one had come forward for a PCR test, there were no RATs at that time so we were relying on symptomatic people to come forward,” Mr Sharp said.
"It was really valuable knowing that the amount there meant we knew it was someone in the community, not someone who had been passing through.
“But we didn’t know the size of the problem we were about to bump into.”
Then finally, the call came through. Someone had tested positive.
Mr Sharp found out through a call from the then-operational director of the Goulburn Valley local public health unit Julyan Howard.
Senior staff met, contact tracers went to work and the information went public and the news broke.
***
The call came into McPherson Media Group content director and then-editor Christine Anderson.
I had walked into work early on Friday and was immediately sat down by her.
I’d spent Thursday writing for the News despite being tapped to fill in for the Cobram Courier for the week.
“We need you to just be writing stories for Cobram today,” she told me, in no uncertain terms.
“I don’t care what anyone else asks you to do, even if I ask you to do something else we need you to be writing for Cobram.”
Less than an hour later, she was back at my desk, phone at her ear.
“You know how I said you had to be working on Cobram? And even if I asked you do something you were supposed to say no? Well...”
***
The second we put the story online, our phones went off the hook and Facebook comments and messages rolled in.
They all wanted to know one thing — where were the exposure sites?
At the time, early in the morning, we didn’t know.
No-one knew — contact tracers had only just begun their work.
Working in a newsroom on that Friday was as high-pressure as any newsroom I’ve been in across five years in journalism.
The sheer volume of information seemed impossible to sort through and sorting fact from fiction on social media seemed impossible.
One journalist’s aunt sent in a list of exposure sites, something we’d desperately been searching for, only for us to check them to find they were the exposure sites from the city’s last outbreak, in October 2020.
The numbers were revised up to seven by the time any exposure sites began rolling in, a gym, a hairdresser, a Chemist Warehouse.
St Mel’s Primary School parents were told to pick up their children.
Then the big one hit.
***
Greater Shepparton Secondary College principal Barbara O’Brien couldn’t believe it.
Local public health unit head honcho Julyan Howard had just told her both Wanganui and McGuire campuses of the school were Tier 1 exposure sites.
“How on earth am I supposed to do that?” she remembers saying.
“I was in shock.”
The implication hit her pretty quickly.
She had to have just under 2000 students picked up from school and sent home into isolation “until further notice”.
No-one was allowed on a crowded bus.
You just had to go home. Do not pass go, do not collect $200, go straight home.
She and other senior leadership made the plan — tell teachers at recess, then once that finished to bring students into homeroom classes and inform them of the news at the same time they uploaded information to Compass, the school’s messaging system.
They quickly realised the third campus, Mooroopna, would also have to close.
“We had teachers there who had children in other year levels, we had students who had siblings in Year 9 who also had to isolate and I realised I would have to close that campus as well,” Ms O’Brien said.
She did it. At McGuire campus, where she was based, she saw students milling around calmly out the front of the school.
Older students walked home. Parents, she said, were “fantastic”.
“When it started we didn’t quite understand the enormity of it, and within 48 hours we knew we were in an absolute crisis.” — then-Shepparton mayor Kim O’Keeffe
Within hours, all three campuses were empty and their students and families in isolation until further notice.
That, she told me, was “the straw which broke the camel’s back”.
“I got a phone call saying ‘you’ve put half the hospital into isolation’, and I was worried if I’d done something wrong, but when I explained it they said ‘oh, right. We didn’t think of that’,” Ms O’Brien said.
It wasn’t just the hospital which suddenly had staff departing in droves.
Across Shepparton, Mooroopna and the region supermarkets, banks, accountants, newspapers — people were rolling out of workplaces across the city and into what would become 14 days of isolation.
By Monday, some 20,000 people of the 60,000 living in Shepparton-Mooroopna would be confined to their homes.
***
Our phones were buzzing off the hook, but our phone wasn’t the only one buzzing.
Ms O’Keeffe had 221 calls and messages on August 20.
She was hobbling around her home with a broken ankle, but still calling people back at 11.30pm.
“There was a bit of panic which set in, people wanted to know what was happening,“ she said.
“When Woolworths and a few other places started saying they would have to close, and click and collect had to shut down because we didn’t have enough staff we started to have a bit of panic,” she said.
“I put the message out there that we had to remain calm, but it was enormous.
“I think it was then we started realising the enormity of what we were facing.”
***
At the time, we still didn’t have a solid grasp on the Delta variant, which had only recently landed in Australia.
There was still concern and uncertainty around this apparent deadly and fast-spreading variant.
Mr Sharp told me and the rest of the Shepparton media pack as such at about 2pm on August 20, when he addressed media telling Shepparton but the nation that cases had jumped from seven to 12.
While they were all linked, they were across three households and more exposure sites were on the way.
More testing sites were rapidly being set up and less than 24 hours later the harness racing track, showgrounds and sports stadium were all testing sites.
People were again urged to stay calm, to get tested, and get vaccinated.
A picture was starting to form for him and senior GV Health staff of how big this outbreak might be.
“There was a degree of anxiety with it, we were anxious but not too anxious — we just did our jobs. We’re used to working in high pressure and time-sensitive situations, it’s what we do all the time. It didn’t affect the way we did our work,” he told me this week.
“It was a new and evolving variant and we didn’t really know about it.
“We were prepared but until you’ve experienced it it’s something a bit different.”
By nightfall, a third of the city was in isolation.
Twelve people were confirmed as positive coronavirus cases.
Five more would be on the way the next day and more the day after that.
***
Exposure sites kept coming the next day.
Across the weekend, more sites were hit, including Notre Dame and other primary schools.
Suddenly, just about anyone with a school-aged child in the city was in isolation.
Notre Dame student Angus Shanahan, who’s been doing work experience with us this week, said it was a difficult time.
“It was really isolating not being able to be with our friends,” he said.
“I was kind of relieved it was after production and I’d got used to learning from home, but for a lot of my friends they found it hard.”
By Saturday afternoon, the entire state was in lockdown.
Sport was cancelled, again. Birthday parties were cancelled, again. Life events were cancelled, again.
Ms O’Keeffe said it dawned on her about Saturday that we were in real trouble, just as she began to deal with government agencies calling her and media appearances across national TV.
“It was enormous,” she said.
“When it started we didn’t quite understand the enormity of it, and within 48 hours we knew we were in an absolute crisis.”
“We knew then we needed help.”
***
The lockdown, suddenly close to home and not two hours down the highway in Melbourne, gave our newsroom an almighty shake, which then-editor Ms Anderson and I spoke about this week.
“We completely switched our focus, the print product was put aside and we plunged all our resources into online,” she said.
“We had four people on on the Saturday at short notice and then more people on Sundays.
“We started our rolling coverage and we had people working from 7am to 9pm.”
Many reporters, including yours truly, were in isolation — I’d been at the Mooroopna campus of the secondary college that week.
Covering the pandemic in lockdown, and on the evening shift, sucked.
“There were a few people who jumped on it immediately, with people posting things on Facebook and straight away it became clear how many people had everyone they knew in strife.“ - Rob Priestly
There’s no two ways about it. I would scroll through Twitter and watch the morning press conference, have some breakfast and then try to make sense of it on the blog during the day.
To call it stressful was an understatement.
But the region was hanging on every word.
It gave me a renewed sense of purpose in the job of telling people things they needed to know.
“We became the place to come for information,” Ms Anderson said.
“We really changed it to an hour-by-hour coverage and moved into that rolling blog, because that was what our readers needed to know.
“People would reach out when they had a notice from their school or they knew somewhere was an exposure site.
“We had one flood in 2012 which was similar, but other than that it was like nothing else I’ve ever experienced.”
The community also rallied like nothing else anyone had experienced.
It also showed the power local media can have.
Now-departed chief correspondent Darren Linton did a power of work on the phone both providing information to the community, but conveying to those in power how much strife we were in.
The News ran a front page crying for help, and another later that week a message of support from leaders all across Australia and the Shepparton community.
“When we did the cry for help front page we were really sending that message to the state government, one that was heard loud and clear,” Ms Anderson said.
“It caused change. It really did. And it showed we were really the paper for the community.”
***
Then deputy mayor Mr Priestly said while he didn’t recall the day of the outbreak clearly, he remembered the weeks that followed.
"It was remarkable what we were able to do across those 10 or 14 days,“ he said.
“When the schools became it exposure sites it was immediately clear how many people would be impacted.
“There were a few people who jumped on it immediately, with people posting things on Facebook and straight away it became clear how many people had everyone they knew in strife.
“There was immediately that sense that we needed to upscale what we were doing.”
He said within days of phone calls with community organisations — FoodShare, Azem Elmaz’s People Helping People, the Lighthouse Foundation and a million more which could fill pages and pages of the paper — Mr Priestly said he saw the power of community.
“From inside the services which came together, it was incredible how quickly everyone jumped to help,” he said.
“I’d ring something and say we needed something and they’d get it to us straight away.”
Ms O’Brien said the same.
The school went from an education provider to an aid organisation at the flick of a switch, with teachers not just teaching but checking in on families.
The school’s multicultural officers were co-ordinating with people who could help bring families food.
The school was the first port of call for information and help for many, many people, and the Ethnic Council was another.
Ms O’Keeffe said she was amazed at how the community pulled together, and it was the “most proud” she was of the city during her four-term tenure as mayor.
“It was just incredible how we all pulled together, some people volunteered who hadn’t before and many of them are still volunteering,” she said.
“It was truly incredible how we all came together. It showed how strong Shepparton really is.”