COVID-19 lockdowns haunt Western Sydney eatery four years after major cluster forced it to close

“This is the COVID-19 restaurant.”

A hushed comment from one passer-by to another still feels like “a knife through the heart” for restaurateur Stephanie Boyd.

More than four years have passed since Western Sydney’s Thai Rock restaurant became ground zero for one of the first major COVID-19 clusters in the city.

More than 100 cases of the then largely mysterious virus were traced back to one lunch service and a single positive staff member in July 2020.

The anxiety and uncertainty of testing, tracing, checking-in and social distancing is a memory many Australians have since tried to forget.

But the ghosts of lockdowns and isolation, are still hidden in hand sanitizer bottles and “COVID safe” stickers dotted around the restaurant.

“As recently as six months ago, you can see and hear (people) do a double-take and make comments,” Ms Boyd said.

Ms Boyd arrived in Western Sydney as a refugee from Thailand when she was 10 years old, a tough start to life which she thought had prepared her for anything.

Relentless media criticism, social media attacks and the stress of opening, closing and managing two restaurants amid an evolving global pandemic, however, took an unprecedented mental toll.

Not to mention the financial strain, which forced one of her businesses to shut its doors forever.

“People would say things like ‘You’ll get a spring roll with a serve of corona’, stupid things like that.

“(I received) personal attacks, telling me to go back to Thailand, calling me names.”

Pandemic flashpoint

Ms Boyd and her husband David live and work in Western Sydney, where the bulk of NSW’s COVID-19 restrictions and deaths took hold.

It was a flashpoint for the state and the country’s response to the pandemic, which has now been the subject of a wide-ranging federal review.

The independent inquiry released in late October, found Australians are unlikely to accept such lockdowns again.

“Community feedback suggests that since the pandemic, some mainstream audiences have become more sceptical and critical of government decision-making,” the review found.

Like Ms Boyd, almost half of Western Sydney’s population was born overseas and 51 per cent speak a language other than English at home.

That complicated the government’s attempts to communicate critical public health messaging.

The review found community organizations were a crucial bridge for communication assistance but were often left unsupported.

“The Settlement Council of Australia (SCOA) in Western Sydney mobilized 22 of its member organizations to make over 14,000 phone calls in language and ran a social media campaign that reached over half a million people,” the review found.

“During the COVID-19 pandemic, intermediaries did a lot of work without additional government support.”

SCOA, the national peak body for migrant settlement services, represents 130 organizations across the country.

Its chief executive officer said faith communities and cultural groups predominantly carried the responsibility of providing trusted translations of crucial messages throughout the pandemic.

“It was almost an intuitive reaction from our sector, that as soon as information needed to get out, we would roll up our sleeves and get it done,” SCOA CEO Sandra Elhelw said.

“In that moment, government turned and asked community leaders to do essential health work… but you can only leverage community infrastructure if you maintain community infrastructure.”

Dubbed the SCOA Health Project, the organization was later responsible for rolling out vaccine messaging in various languages, ultimately reaching hundreds of thousands of people across the country.

Ms Elhelw hopes the model can be reused in future pandemics or other national emergencies such as floods and bushfires.

“Beyond just COVID specifically, community infrastructure is worth investing in… because in moments like this you can leverage it,” Ms Elhelw says.

“You can’t build up that capacity in a day and a night. Now that we’ve built it up, we’re hoping to maintain that muscle so that in any point in time, we have this model in place that allows us to mobilize quickly.”

Future pandemics ‘inevitable’

The review’s authors found the phrase “building the plane while it was flying” was a common theme throughout the inquiry, a sentiment shared by Ms Boyd and her family.

“NSW Health (didn’t) even know what to do,” she says of her 2,020 interactions with the authorities.

“We were on the phone to them every day… they were at a loss as well.”

The public’s trust in the government has been eroded, the inquiry found, and lockdowns caused its credibility to be lost.

“In the future, Australians will only have an appetite for short, sharp lockdowns, if any at all, and there would probably be decreased public compliance,” the report found.

The inquiry found that a future pandemic is inevitable, making a string of recommendations to help write the playbook for the next one, including the establishment of a national Center for Disease Control, which the government says it hopes to have operational by 2026.

Despite the inquiry’s findings and the potential financial strain, Ms Boyd wouldn’t hesitate to close her restaurant’s doors again in the future.

“I would still listen to the government, I would still abide by the rules,” she says.