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Crocs and Irukandji: A World Away From the Coronavirus Pandemic. Almost. - New York Times Australia

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For the past few weeks, I have worried more about being stung by a deadly Irukandji jellyfish or attacked by a crocodile, rather than contracting the coronavirus.

Here, in Queensland (where I have been based in recent weeks, mostly in Cairns) there have been just 1,093 cases, and only a handful of those are current. Shopping for groceries, walking along an esplanade, or eating at a busy restaurant, it might be easy to mistake the world here for the one that existed before the pandemic.

But scratch the surface, and the harsh reality of the virus and its global impacts come flooding back. Tropical North Queensland, a stretch of white sand beaches and small towns running from the town of Cardwell to the Torres Strait Islands, may not look like it’s suffering from the pandemic — but it is.

Though cases of the virus itself here are few, the region’s economy has been devastated by the severe (nearly 100 percent) decline in overseas arrivals over the past few months. The people who usually come in throngs at this time of year to visit the largest living structure on earth — The Great Barrier Reef — are nowhere near Australia’s most famous natural wonder nor the businesses that make a living from their free-spending ways.

The result has been a surreal experience for tourism and dive operators, who, already worried about the looming impacts of global warming on the city of Cairns, the gateway to the reef, have now been delivered a hammer blow from the virus.

Even in more festive arenas, the facade of normality can also quickly fall away.

On a recent Saturday night, a line snaked down one of the main streets in Cairns as a crowd waited to get into the only club in town. There, an engineer from Sydney said he had lost his job, and was now on his way to Darwin to pick mangoes, where he had heard he could earn a living wage. A purple neon sign above the club’s entrance told patrons: “The Government Says NO DANCING!”

Inside, the venue (which can usually hold thousands of people ) wasn’t packed — it’s capacity was limited by the coronavirus.

“We have to get everyone to sit down,” said Amy Sully, a bartender working inside the venue, where stranded backpackers and young locals, barred from standing up on the dance floor, had arranged their stools in a tight circle from which they fistbumped and gyrated their hips.

I had to give them credit — they managed to lift chair-dancing to unforeseen levels.

One woman had risen on her toes, her stiletto heels hooked to the stool, her body inches from the seat. Others dragged their chairs around the dance floor with them so that if caught dancing illicitly, they could sit down immediately, as if in a pandemic game of musical chairs.

“It’s not like we want to do that,” Ms. Sully said of the task of forcing patrons to re-seat themselves. She and her co-workers resented the government’s restrictions. They told me the rules felt unfair and piecemeal in a place where cases of the virus itself have been so few, adding that the regulations were a pain “for everyone.”

Many locals share this attitude: though most abide by government guidelines, others are increasingly resistant to rules like social distancing, which in a place where no one is sick, can seem bizarre and almost arbitrary. (Don’t stand up while drinking alcohol. Only the bride and groom may dance at weddings. Check in to venues for contact tracing. Hand sanitize.)

And while some express empathy for Victorians — now under some of the strictest lockdown measures in the world after second wave of the virus — others express a kind of one-upmanship and pride that Queenslanders are not sick, because people in the state did the right thing, as compared with their counterparts further south.

Others go even further with their scorn.

Driving in Cabarita Beach, a sleepy beach town on the border between northern New South Wales and Queensland, I became the unwitting recipient of what I have dubbed “plate hate,” when a man, upon seeing my Victoria license plates, shouted: “I hope you didn’t bring any viruses with you.” (For the record, I had crossed from my home city of Melbourne in accordance with government restrictions.)

This kind of state tribalism is raising new and sometimes ugly questions about the reality of living in a pandemic world.

What happens when some places seem to be randomly and unfairly struck by the virus, while in others, life can go on as normal? When authorities escape blame, say for breaches in quarantine, will frustration fall unfairly on individuals? What about when they task citizens with policing new rules — in dance clubs for example — that other states have deemed to be too draconian or ineffective?

Are you experiencing moral and public health conundrums in a place hit hard by the virus, or not at all? We want to hear about your experience navigating pandemic rules around Australia. Write to us at nytaustralia@nytimes.com.

Now, on to our stories of the week.


Credit...AnnaMaria Antoinette D'Addario for The New York Times

Credit...Erin Schaff/The New York Times

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Crocs and Irukandji: A World Away From the Coronavirus Pandemic. Almost. - New York Times Australia
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