Public frustration and anger bubbled up on Thursday evening when hundreds of people streamed into the drive-through testing clinic in Exhibition Park, expecting express service.
It's such a Canberra thing; we live in a compact, well-ordered city where we always expect to be able to drive across town in 20 minutes, find a parking spot a short stroll from where we need to be and, importantly, never have to wait long for anything.
But when the ribbons of traffic began to pour into EPIC on Thursday afternoon as details of the exposure sites emerged, demand was clearly going to far outstrip capability.
The clinic stayed open later to try and push through as many tests as possible, with the final swabs taken just before midnight.
But despite the best efforts of the staff, hundreds had to be turned away.
For the 7am opening the following day, the queues of cars were already out the carpark.
Then the grumbling began about why a rapid government scale-up capability wasn't ready to go. The frustration was understandable. No one wants to spend a day stuck in the car, especially with the stress of lockdown.
Lessons from elsewhere tell us that scale-up doesn't happen overnight.
This will take time, particularly given that full details of the Gold Creek school outbreak only emerged on Friday and the dedicated testing site to be set up there, exclusively for those secondary and casual contacts, will inevitably draw off more staff and resources.
The next week of lockdown will be a lesson in patience for Canberrans because - and it may be a little scary to contemplate - this situation may go on for a fair bit longer than that if case numbers accelerate and we find people have been circulating around the community while infected.
While ACT Health had planned for this Delta strain Covid outbreak eventuality for weeks and months, our tiny territory doesn't have the resources nor the practised expertise of other jurisidictions at skills such as contract tracing.
If case numbers grow, the pressure increases on those people working the phones and chasing the loose ends.
Keeping the lockdown to one week is wildly optimistic but it's worth pushing for. We may need to steel ourselves that the luck we had for more than a year of keeping the virus at bay and enjoying a near-normal life might have finally run out.
To roll the numbers right back to zero and ensure all those active cases are in quarantine could, at best, be a two- to three-week exercise.
This lockdown also has served as a reminder of how, as a territory surrounded on all sides by NSW and people constantly on the move between the two, being part of a region is a complicated business.
Given our porous borders, making Covid rules for just the ACT is completely impractical. Wisely, standing travel exemptions were spread out, allowing these NSW residents to travel into Canberra for a range of compassionate and essential purposes.
But just as has been experienced in the NSW lockdowns, it's difficult to zone off people like creating a defensive structure on some sort of oversized basketball court. People in Braidwood and Cooma, quite rightly, feel miffed at being excluded.
Curious, too, was the number of Canberra tradies on day one of the lockdown who found work over the border while within the ACT, building sites were shut.
Actively policing for breaches is vital in keeping the virus from spreading but our region's cross-border mobility, which traditionally has benefited both economies, always creates issues when different rules apply.
