As I wrote yesterday, it’s looking more and more like a case of Back to the COVID Future in Victoria. Hotel quarantine stuff-ups, restrictions, masks and a government that can’t sort its arse from its elbow: we’ve read this script before.
The moral of the story is getting clearer, though: “eliminating COVID” is a delusion.
Victoria has been forced to reintroduce Covid-19 restrictions across Melbourne after a cluster of cases in the city’s northern suburbs grew to nine infections.
Genomic testing has confirmed the cases were linked to a man who tested positive after he had returned to Victoria from quarantining in an Adelaide hotel[…]
Quarantine-free travel between Victoria and New Zealand is to also be paused – for at least 72 hours – authorities in Wellington said on Tuesday.
Hotel quarantine – again. Even without the Keystone Kops mismanagement of Victoria’s quarantine regime, hotel quarantine is a disaster waiting to happen. Yet governments and health bureaucrats persist. It’s almost like the “experts” haven’t got a damned clue what they’re doing.
When I wrote my first post, Victoria had recorded just a handful of new cases. So it might have seem premature for authorities there to hit the panic button, but this is Victoria we’re talking about.
At the centre of the cluster is a man in his 60s – the fifth case – who became symptomatic last Monday but was only tested a week later after being identified as a close contact of a previous case.
Victorian health officials say there could be more cases linked to the traveller who had returned from Adelaide, with the missing link between the man and the rest of the infections not yet found.
What we see here is what has been keeping some people awake at night for months: six months after its deadly second wave ended, Victoria still hasn’t sorted out its contact tracing. Contact tracing is one of the critical tools for dealing with COVID. Yet Victoria’s system remains a mess. Contacts can’t be traced and, even then, Victorian authorities keep listing the wrong sites.
On Friday, the Health Department disclosed it had wrongly declared the Epping Woolworths as an exposure site visited by the Adelaide returnee on May 8. In fact, the man had visited the Epping North Woolworths, with the department blaming electronic banking records and the supermarket’s proximity to a spice shop the man had visited for the mix-up.
While the first case detected on Monday also visited Epping North Woolworths while likely infectious on Saturday May 22, he is believed to have contracted the virus from the man in his 60s, with Professor Sutton saying there was “no evidence” that the supermarket was a transmission site.
Professor Sutton said he was more concerned about a journey the man had taken on May 7 from the outer northern suburb of Craigieburn in and out of the CBD on a train crowded with AFL fans.
While the cluster remains small – just 15 cases – it has grown at a worryingly rapid pace over the last few days. No one should delude themselves that Victoria’s government or bureaucracy have got a handle on this.
If all that isn’t enough to send a shiver down your spine, Premier Daniel Andrews is rumoured to be returning to the job any day, after an injury in a fall two months ago.
Among the exposure sites visited by members of the cluster are the Bamboo House restaurant in Chinatown, the Clifton Hill McDonald’s, the Highpoint shopping centre, a stadium in Brunswick, a swim school in Bundoora, a soccer field and service station in Reservoir and shops in Epping[…]
Julian Rait, the Victorian president of the Australian Medical Association, said this outbreak was a “stark reminder” that anyone who is eligible to be vaccinated should.
The Australian
Well, it’s certainly a reminder that anyone who thinks they can “eliminate” COVID, no matter how remote or isolated they are, is bullshitting. COVID is here to stay and will almost certainly become just another seasonal infection.
Herd immunity is the only answer.
Whether that’s by vaccination, or by letting the disease run its course while protecting those small segments of the population most vulnerable: either way, we’ll just have to learn to live with it.
It’s either that, or put up with an endless regime of lockdowns and muzzles.
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