When Robert Merkel was enjoying a cycling trip through the remote high country of Victoria in early February, coronavirus was still a distant rumble in a foreign country. But even then he could sense storm clouds starting to gather.
By the time the Women’s World Cup final at Melbourne Cricket Ground rolled around on 8 March, the 43-year-old software engineer and father of one was beginning to question the wisdom of attending.
“As history has revealed there was one person out of a crowd of 86,000 confirmed to have the coronavirus at that event,” he says. “It was a terrific night … but there was already that sense that this might be the last kind of big public event for a while.”
“The next weekend was a kid’s birthday party and by that stage it was definitely a discussion … The whole social distancing had already started. People weren’t coming up to each other. There were no hugs and that kind of thing.”
In late March the government announced that all bars, clubs, restaurants, cinemas, places of worship, casinos and gyms would close.
“Things just got crazier and crazier,” he says.
Soon Merkel and his partner were grappling with the same difficult decisions around work and family facing thousands of Australians. Do we take our daughter out of childcare? How do we work from home and care for her at the same time? Which parts of our work are “essential” and where can we compromise?
“We worked through that pretty well, but we had some more frank conversations than we normally have to have about how much time we can devote to things,” he says.
His position on the board of his four-year-old daughter’s childcare centre added another layer of stress – not helped by mixed messages from governments on whether parents should send their children or keep them at home.
“I don’t think I really signed up for what we were dealing with sitting on the creche committee because there was the health concern and there were also very serious financial concerns,” he says.
But the experience generated sympathy for the decisions the politicians were making at the same time on a much larger scale.
“There was a moment [during a] Daniel Andrews press conference when the cameras started rolling a little bit before he started his spiel and you could see how tired and stressed he was,” he says.
“They’re going to have to live with [those decisions] for the rest of their lives and no matter what call they made it was going to have huge consequences for millions of people.”
Merkel’s familiarity with statistical modelling through his work gave him an extra layer of insight into the various research papers that were circulating about virus transmission in the community.
“I’m not a medical doctor, but I can understand the maths and I can understand what is going on with modelling,” he says. “The models really were telling them that closing the schools wasn’t going to make a lot of difference.
“It might have slowed things down a little bit, but trying to convince people of the validity of models they don’t understand … Well we’ve been trying to convince people about that in the context of climate change for decades now and failing.
“In an emergency situation, trying to convince people of something horribly counterintuitive and asking them to seemingly put their children and their family at risk, you kind of understand the difficulties there.”
A silver lining of the pandemic has been the opportunity for Merkel to spend more time at home playing with his daughter.
“We do a fair bit of it anyway [but] we’re doing more of it now and taking more responsibility for intellectual stimulation – and watching new capabilities, new things she can do, new ways that she sees the world,” he says. “That’s really wonderful, and she’s such a bright and happy kid.”
At the same time the experience has given Merkel a renewed appreciation for early childhood educators.
“I could not do what they do,” he says. “And the fact that we pay them so little ... God it’s so tiring. It is incredibly tiring and the lack of respect we show to professionals looking after children and, historically, women at home looking after children.
“Nothing like doing it day after day brings it back to you more than that: how challenging the task of bringing a child up is. She went through a period where I was her basically handmaiden. It was just: ‘Get this, get this, get this, get this, get this. Sit there. Not there, there!’”
As Australia begins to emerge from the tight lockdown restrictions of the past few months, Merkel wonders how his daughter will remember this period. One of his earliest memories is of the Moscow Olympics at the age of four – his daughter’s age now.
He’s been making an effort to capture the experience on his phone so he can show her when she’s older. And when restrictions eased and his council left one of the “closed” signs removed from his local playground lying on the ground, Merkel kept it as a souvenir.
“So if my daughter gets a school project in a few years’ time and wants to know what it was like, I’ve got something to show her.”
Postcards from the pandemic looks at how everyday Australians are coping with immense changes coronavirus has brought to their lives. We’d like to hear your story about how you are managing during this crisis. Email: postcards@theguardian.com
