Some of the most unsettling aspects of the coronavirus crisis have come with knowing what we need to do.
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We can take control of our own lives and adopt those general edicts that will help contain the pandemic - keeping your distance, staying home - but outside of that it has all been a blur.
This week was very much a case in point.
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Clearly frustrated by the federal government failing to lead where they felt it should be doing just that, NSW and Victoria decided to go it alone in implementing a regime of quarantine-related measures.
The approach by Victorian Premier Dan Andrews and his NSW counterpart, Gladys Berejiklian, might have involved news that would create great distress - specifically the effective shutdown of the hospitality industry, with the vast job losses this entails - but at least there was a clear way forward.
Everything is going to get a lot harder, and for quite some time, before it gets easier; it's an inevitability that we are all beginning to accept.
But what is unacceptable is that lack of consistency in delivering the key messages by which we need to live in what on Tuesday an Albury magistrate succinctly described as "strange times".
To be fair to the federal government, we are at least starting to see the introduction of an effective advertising campaign.
The world of social media has proven just how disruptive and downright dangerous it can be when "expert" opinions abound when we simply don't know who is the expert we should trust.
On Tuesday, we had the wrong message floating around the Border, compliments of Albury mayor Kevin Mack.
Cr Mack thought he had the inside running on information that the NSW and Victorian border was about to close.
He got it wrong. He didn't know, nor should he have been throwing around such conjecture.
We don't need this when a pandemic is bearing down on us all.
