COVID-19 lockdown haunts Western Sydney eatery four years after major cluster forced it to close

“This is a Covid-19 restaurant.”

One passerby’s muffled comment to another still feels like a knife in the heart for restaurateur Stephanie Boyd.

It’s been more than four years since Western Sydney’s Thai Rock restaurant became the epicenter of one of the city’s first major COVID-19 clusters.

In July 2020, more than 100 cases of the then-mysterious virus were linked to one dining room table and one positive employee.

The anxiety and uncertainty surrounding testing, tracing, recording and social distancing are memories that many Australians have since tried to forget.

But the ghosts of lockdown and isolation remain hidden in the bottles of hand sanitizer and “COVID-safe” stickers scattered throughout the restaurant.

“Even six months ago you could see and hear (people) re-evaluating the situation and making comments,” Ms Boyd said.

Ms Boyd arrived in Western Sydney as a refugee from Thailand when she was 10, and it was a tough start to life that she believes prepared her for anything.

However, relentless media criticism, social media attacks and the stress of opening, closing and running two restaurants amid an evolving global pandemic have taken an unprecedented mental toll.

Not to mention financial difficulties that forced one of her businesses to close permanently.

“People were saying things like, ‘You’ll get a spring roll with a side of corona,’ and stupid things like that.

“(I received) personal attacks: they told me to go back to Thailand, they called me names.”

Pandemic hot spot

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

It has become a flashpoint for the state and national response to the pandemic, which is now the subject of a wide-ranging federal review.

An independent investigation published at the end of October found Australians were unlikely to agree to such lockdowns again.

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

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.

This has complicated the government’s attempts to convey critical public health messages.

The review found that community organizations are a critical bridge to providing communication support, but are often left unsupported.

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

“During the COVID-19 pandemic, mediators have done a great job without additional government support.”

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

Its chief executive said religious communities and cultural groups have a primary responsibility for ensuring reliable translations of critical messages throughout the pandemic.

“It was almost a gut reaction from our sector that as soon as the information had to come out, we rolled up our sleeves and did it,” said SCOA CEO Sandra Elhelw.

“At that point, the government reached out and asked community leaders to do the necessary health work… but you can only use public infrastructure if you support public infrastructure.”

This organization, called the SCOA Health Project, was later responsible for disseminating vaccine information in multiple 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, it’s worth investing in public infrastructure… because in times like these you can use it,” Ms Elhelw says.

“You can’t build this ability overnight. Now that we’ve built it up, we hope to maintain those muscles so that at any given time we have this model that will allow us to mobilize quickly.”

Future pandemics are ‘inevitable’

The review authors found that the phrase “build the plane as it flies” was a common theme throughout the investigation, a sentiment shared by Ms Boyd and her family.

“NSW Health (didn’t) even know what to do,” she says of her 2020 interactions with authorities.

“We talked to them on the phone every day… they were confused too.”

Public trust in the government has been undermined, an investigation has found, and the lockdown has led to a loss of confidence in it.

“In the future, Australians will want only short, sharp lockdowns, if any, and public acceptance of them is likely to decline,” the report said.

The investigation found that a future pandemic was inevitable and made a number of recommendations to help write the script for the next one, including the creation of a national Center for Disease Control, which the government says it hopes to have operational by 2026.

Despite the investigation’s findings and the potential financial strain, Ms Boyd will not hesitate to close her restaurant’s doors again in the future.

“I will still listen to the government, I will still follow the rules,” she says.