In the Victorian high country town of Bright, hope for a strong recovery after a summer of devastating bushfires was given human form in the shape of the US singer Katy Perry. The pop star performed to a crowd of thousands at Bright on 11 March, the first of a series of major events intended to bring tourists, and their wallets, back to fire-ravaged communities and put struggling businesses back on their feet. “The press coverage for Katy Perry we could not have purchased – it was just enormous,” says the Alpine shire mayor, Peter Roper. “It was a really good, healing thing for the community to be able to take part in. I now know why she has got so many Instagram followers, she is really empathetic, a lovely person. “And then, well, you know what happened next.” Within hours of Perry’s performance, the World Health Organization declared a pandemic. Two days later, the Australian government announced a ban on all mass gatherings of more than 500 people. The events that bushfire-affected communities throughout Victoria had planned were suddenly cancelled. Then came the ban on attending restaurants or cafes, and the ban on non-essential travel. The Easter school holidays, second only to the summer holidays in the number of tourists they bring to the coastal and highlands communities worst hit by the bushfires, were nixed. “The bushfires cost us $90m,” Roper says. “I have not even bothered to work out what the Covid-19 is going to cost us because every day something new happens.” When Guardian Australia spoke to tourism operators in bushfire-affected towns in January, their hope rested on a strong Easter. Local governments were promoting shop-and-stay holidays and city residents were promising to return to holiday towns such as Eden and Mallacoota with their wallets open. Instead, two months later, Sydney and Canberra residents have been told to stay away from their holiday houses on the NSW south coast lest they bring the coronavirus with them. Neil Triggs owns a brewery in Bruthen, in East Gippsland, and lost his home in nearby Sarsfield in the bushfires. He had a few good weeks between the end of January and the declaration of the pandemic. “We were just getting back on our feet, starting to reopen the restaurant and getting ourselves back together and then this coronavirus hits and we are closed,” Triggs says. “Can’t do much about it.” The friends that they were house-sitting for until their own home could be rebuilt had to cancel their holiday, so Triggs and his wife moved into a cabin at the Bruthen caravan park. The caravan park had been filled with volunteers from bushfire charity Blaze Aid, but most of those volunteers have now gone home. “You have just got to roll with the punches and just keep going – you can’t do much else,” Triggs says. The summer bushfires destroyed more than 3,000 homes and 7,000 other buildings, and killed more than 80,000 head of livestock and untold millions of native animals. Thirty-three people also lost their lives. The total area burned was just over 10m hectares, or 1.6% of Australia’s total landmass, across six states and territories. No one expected it would so swiftly be overshadowed by another global catastrophe. “It’s an absolute double-whammy,” says the Indi MP, Helen Haines. “People affected by bushfires are so generous and so resilient. And they kind of get it – they say we are no longer on the front page, no one is talking about us on the radio because Covid is much bigger than us.” The state and federal bushfire recovery agencies have had to redesign their response on the fly to adapt to coronavirus restrictions. The first hearing of the royal commission into national natural disaster arrangements on Thursday was held via webcast. And this week Haines held a local roundtable with the national bushfire recovery coordinator, Andrew Colvin, and 70 participants split across two days on Zoom. “There has been a major rethink,” says Haines. “A linchpin of the first six months of bushfire recovery was around tourism and events, and that’s gone.” She has urged small businesses to take up available bushfire grants to help their businesses survive the shutdown, but says the inability to make an application in person, in regions that have both poor internet access and low digital literacy, was affecting the rollout of funds. Others – particularly farmers in the Upper Murray region, where tens of thousands of cattle were lost – were ashamed to apply for grants, saying others had it worse than them, or were concerned it would make them look like a bad manager. “But in reality, they are very close to the bone,” says Haines. The uptake of the $10,000 small business support grant has been 30 times greater in New South Wales than in Victoria. About 10,000 people across 17 eligible local government areas have applied in NSW and $100m in grants have been delivered. In Victoria, as of Thursday, just 331 applications have been received from the three eligible local government areas in that state, of which 267, worth $2.67m, have been paid out. A spokesman for Bushfire Recovery Victoria said the agency had simplified the application process after receiving community feedback that the process, which previously required businesses to provide proof of lost earnings in the form of a bank statement or BAS statement, was “somewhat difficult”. Including that information is now optional. “We therefore anticipate a big uptick in applications now this new, fast and easy process is in place,” the spokesman said. Haines says the coronavirus control measures had only increased the need to get funds delivered to affected communities as soon as possible. “I have had people say to me, in terms of their mental health: we do not need counselling, we need cash,” she says. “Our mental health would be a hell of a lot better if we got that cash straight away, and in the bank.”