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How the numbers got away from control in Victoria during the 2nd wave

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 This is a good effort by ABC 730 report:

Breaking down Victoria’s coronavirus numbers
Tuesday 4 August 2020 3:44pm

INGA TING, REPORTER: As Melbourne faces its toughest restrictions yet there is one chart that may explain why.

If we compare the growth in cases for Victoria’s two waves, it is clear the effect of July’s lockdown has been nowhere near as dramatic at the first time around.

Following the lockdown in March, the growth rate of new cases more than halved in the first two weeks. This time it has taken three weeks.

PROF. RAINA MACINTYRE, EPIDEMIOLOGIST, KIRBY INSTITUTE: Back then, the majority of the cases were being imported in through travel which made them very easy to identify and manage.

Here we have got transmission ripping through the community and we don’t exactly know where all those cases are. The human resources requirement for tracing the contacts is really on the edge, on the limit of capacity.

INGA TING: But while case counts dominate headlines they depend heavily on testing and here Victoria’s record has been patchy.

During the first wave, the state’s per capita testing rates trailed most of the other jurisdictions sitting at half the rate of South Australia.

Then in May a testing blitz across Victoria saw the state shoot to the top spot – at its peak doubling the rate of its closest rival, New South Wales.

By mid-June however, the state had once again slumped to the back of the pack.

From mid-June to mid-July testing rose again, this time seven-fold but during the same period, new infections per day soared 50-fold and this week reached an average of 520 a day.

RAINA MACINTYRE: Now if Victoria wasn’t testing as much as they could have a month or two ago, that may have contributed to some extent, but I’m reluctant to really try to pin the blame on that.

I think they did do a really good job in terms of expanding the testing massively when it became apparent that there were clusters. They took the testing out to the community to make it accessible and easy for people.

So you can’t really fault them on that. I think in this case it seems like there was a breach in quarantine.

INGA TING: But it is the source of infections, more than the number of cases, that most worries experts.

In Victoria more than 400 cases a day on average are found to be locally spread, 12 times as many as during the first peak.

Of those, one in four are cases of community transmission, meaning contact tracers have not been able to identify the source of infection.

At the peak of the first wave the number of cases under investigation was 70 a day. Now there is a back log of more than 3,400.

RAINA MACINTYRE: So, we often just think about hospital capacity and ventilator capacity but the capacity to trace contacts is also critical because that is what will make the outbreak spread out of control.

INGA TING: As Victoria grapples to contain the outbreak, New South Wales remains on high alert.

Experts warn that greater freedom to socialise and gather in New South Wales compared to Victoria means the virus has more opportunity to spread to more people.

RAINA MACINTYRE: You can think of New South Wales being where Victoria was in the middle of June which means that could go in the same direction.

We should be encouraging everyone to be using a mask in New South Wales and again, promoting it as something that may help us retain our freedoms rather than something that takes away our freedom.


Source: http://gmopundit.blogspot.com/2020/08/how-numbers-got-away-from-control-in.html



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