Melbourne’s unprecedented stage 4 coronavirus lockdown is taking a toll on those residing in the city – including the hosts of The Project.
Steve Price couldn’t help but get emotional after presenting a segment on the tough new lockdowns Victorian’s are having to face.
“It feels so much different this time, doesn’t it. I feel sad, I feel anxious … I feel sad for all of the businesses that aren’t going to recover. I feel very anxious for the state that I’ve spent much of my life living in, that many of the things we take for granted may never come back. The first time around it was sort of unique; we didn’t really know what it was going to be like. Now we know what it’s going to be like, and you can’t see an end,” he said.
Host Carrie Bickmore also shared her sentiments by confessing things have become tougher in her household, as she’d noticed her children “really struggling for the first time”.
“(They have) this feeling of, ‘What is this world we’re living in?’ And maybe looking at us for comfort, but we’ve stopped being all, ‘We’ll be right,’” she said.
Price then made a confession about his own family situation.
“My mother’s in her late 80s; I’ve seen her once this year. She’s in the zone where anything could happen. I just feel gutted that I might never physically see her again. It’s awful. It’s awful,” he said, as his co-stars rushed to console him.
“Oh, Steve … You have to have hope that at the end of this we will get on top of it, and you will be able to see her. That’s the sort of stuff you have to look to; you can’t think like that,” Bickmore said.
Co-host Waleed Aly agreed: “There’s every chance you will see your mum in the not-too-distant future.”
“I hope so, ’cos it just breaks my heart,” Price said.
“It would break anybody’s heart – but we can do this. We can,” Aly said.
Melburnians are now facing some of the toughest lockdown conditions in the world, as the government tried to desperately contain the number of infections every day.
This article originally appeared on Over60.