The good news: Lockdowns will end sooner than expected. Not soon enough for some desperate businesses, but sooner than Dan Andrew’s modelers thought.
As I predicted, Victoria is doing better than the models estimated. Many people focus on the “daily new cases” but the “unknown source cases” is a better, more forward looking tool.
In Newspoll today we find — also as I predicted from the outset of the pandemic — that health is priority one for most voters. It’s an awkward fact of democracy. As drastic as the restrictions are in Victoria, more than half the voters are happy to give up some freedom temporarily in order to save lives, hardship and unknown health effects, and the burden on healthworkers.
Right-leaning small business owners and entrepreneurs are often not at all happy about giving up freedom. They’re much more comfortable taking risks, but most of the population are not. It’s a personality type thing. It’s not going to change. (What’s obscene though, is that those comfortable taking risks are bearing more of the costs while public servants like Dan Andrews are getting fat pay rises. )
Despite the strict restrictions, fully 71% of Victorians view the restrictions as “about right” or “too lenient”. One quarter say they are “too strict”. The biggest fear at the moment, of 56% of Victorians, is relaxing restrictions too soon. Though 39% are worried things are moving too slowly. Given the poor modeling, it’s easy to understand the latter point of view. It’s virtually certain now that Victoria will emerge from the restrictions faster than the tough plan of a few weeks ago. The two groups are not as far apart as you might think. Fears of “relaxing too soon” are basically fears of a third lockdown, and nobody wants that.
Unknown source cases: the most important graph for forecasting
On Sept 8th, I said that the Victorian cases would come down faster than expected purely because the cases with unknown sources were already under control by then. Incredibly, the model used to predict how long it would take to bring cases down did not even consider whether the cases were “unknown” source or known local transmission. It makes all the difference in the world whether the clusters are trackable or not.
Here’s an update of that graph showing that for the last two weeks Victoria has been running a negative count on “unknown” source cases as finally got a grip on this epidemic and stitched together the mysterious clusters to figure out how the virus spread.
Victoria has done a lot better than NSW in the last two weeks (on unknown sources)
Victoria has 101 fewer “unknown source cases” in the last two weeks. NSW has 85 more cases.
As we’d expect — given the much stricter restrictions in Victoria — the spread of mystery infections is slowing in Victoria but continuing at a constant low rate in NSW. Based on this limited net daily data (from Covidlive) we can say that since Sept 8, Victoria has reported 8 unknown source cases but identified the source of 111 cases, whereas NSW has discovered 86 people with infections that it can’t explain. These are only “net daily figures”, but the latest press release from Vic Health shows that only 3 cases are unknown among the current 657 that are active. Though sewage tests hint that there may be an unknown outbreak in Apollo Bay.
Following the mystery cases down, the total daily new cases in Victoria have fallen: 39, 32, 27, 42, 22, 8, 9 and 28. This has prompted the Chief Medical Officer to admit Victoria would likely reconsider the roadmap.
Queensland, meanwhile, has had three unknown-source cases in the last eight weeks and found the cause of one. Two of those were three weeks ago, so if they haven’t spread, it’s happy days for Queenslanders. So far, I count ten days in a row with no mystery cases. We shouldn’t count chickens and all, but theoretically, in two and a half weeks Queensland might reach the 28 days with community transmission. Elimination.
Arguably the largest public policy failure in Australian history
The second wave was so much worse. Look at how fast that infection spread. All that second wave came from just two hotel breaches: the Rydges on Swanson and the Stamford Plaza. All of the billions of dollars lost, the restrictions, the pain, and 740+ deaths could have been avoided with a strong border.
Without those breaches NSW and Qld would have no cases now too (if only they had not let the virus in).
All states of Australia would have been flying freely right now. No internal borders needed.
Despite the extraordinary grand failure in Victoria, remarkably, somehow, 62% of voters are satisfied with Dan Andrews performance, which seems hard to believe. It’s risen 5% since July. While many Victorians feel the lockdown has been draconian, the majority support it.
Victoria, covid infection, graph, new daily cases, Sept 2020.
Arguably the biggest policy failure of all though could be the denial of benefits from so many other potential treatments, the lack of Vitamin D3 use, the political opposition to HCQ, Ivermectin, Bromhexine (cough syrup), and the many antiviral options.
The lack of Vitamin D3 is an ongoing scandal, and a travesty causing an increase in mortality from many infectious diseases, as well as likely cancer and many other causes. It’s one of the few vitamins associated with a reduction in all cause mortality.
Vaccines for the Flu have been pushed and promoted for years, but where was the campaign to make sure everyone had enough of the safe and cheap and essential nutrient? Vitamin D reduced the rate of ICU admission from 50% to 2%. Do black lives matter?
10%: The hospital burden is too much for any nation
The state of Victoria:
- Active Cases: 620
- Hospital: 80
- ICU: 8
The hospitalization rate is around 10%, and that’s with one of the highest testing regimes in the world where test positivity was 1% a month ago, but is as low as 0.2% now. Even if we ignore mortality, the hospital burden of Covid-19 is significant, and some restrictions are inevitable and necessary just to keep hospitals functioning. The toll on healthworkers has been significant too and nurses have had to be flown in from WA, SA and Qld. Clearly if all the states of Australia were dealing with major outbreaks like this one, it breaks the hospital system. And we know in other nations, death rates climb rapidly once hospitals have to turn people away.