one case total lockdown australias lessons

ONE CASE TOTAL LOCKDOWN AUSTRALIAS LESSONS FULL
ONE CASE TOTAL LOCKDOWN AUSTRALIAS LESSONS PLUS

Do we really have to wait until it does before reversing it? The USA and Brazil are not outliers.

So far that policy has not cost many lives. Yet Government policy continues to be for further loosening and opening up. To me that necessarily implies the present levels need to be tightened.

We also now know that at the present levels of social distancing etc a small single cause outbreak can easily become an epidemic. The public health officials in charge have confirmed this repeatedly. No matter how egregious the blunders that produced this particular outbreak might be, we know that there will be more outbreaks regardless of how well those particular blunders are dealt with. Obviously the public health authorities making the local attempt are in a better position to judge the likelihood of success than anybody else and are entitled to a “margin for appreciation” in not knowing what to do quickly enough.Īssuming they are right and the current second wave is contained locally, what does that tell us about the policy of “Suppression”?

ONE CASE TOTAL LOCKDOWN AUSTRALIAS LESSONS FULL

But we do at least have a path towards a full shutdown again by simply adding postcodes as the efforts fail. We won’t know if it is sufficiently localised now until the current efforts have either succeeded or failed. The underlying community transmission could not reasonably be assumed to be sufficiently localised for that to work. If that was not the case, it would be illogical to attempt just shutting down local areas, except as a way of preparing for a wider shutdown. The virus strains of many current cases were not known in Victoria prior to the shutdown and so can reasonably be assumed to have arisen from failures of quarantine of incoming travellers rather than from underlying Obviously it is better to impose these restrictions locally than nationally if that can work, just as it is better to isolate large numbers of “contacts” than to shutdown the whole society.īut the main reason for confidence that these local shutdowns could work is the genomic evidence that they originate from a single common cause. We know that if containment fails we can revert to stage 3 restrictions and expect them to work rapidly enough to avoid the increased surge capacity being overwhelmed.The surge capacity of the hopsitals has been greatly increased.We are able to do far more testing now and can be more confident that the level of community transmission is not already dramatically higher than we are aware of.It may well be feasible to contain the current epidemic wave without the wider response that was needed in March, because:

ONE CASE TOTAL LOCKDOWN AUSTRALIAS LESSONS PLUS

We are now restoring the same level of “stay at home” orders in 12 postcodes that we had more widely in March, plus a total lockdown for 3,000 people (enforced by 500 police, 1 for every two or three households!). That level is higher than when Australia abruptly went into stage 3 physical distancing. The resources available for testing, contact tracing and isolation can contain an outbreak that really is just local, sporadic and occasional.īut with any level of underlying “community transmission” there is simply no way to avoid the statistical certainty that some of the regular inevitable clusters resulting from that will become outbreaks, some of which will again become epidemics.Īccording to the current testing results we now have an unacceptable level of community transmission from untraced sources whose contacts are unknown and cannot be isolated. The point is that sporadic outbreaks can be contained by the sort of local measures successfully undertaken relatively easily in regional Northern Tasmania and now being taken with greater difficulty in suburban Melbourne. But perhaps it indicates that if and when that does become clear, the resulting shutdown will be clearly aimed at Eradication.Įven with successful Eradication (at least a month with no new cases) it can be expected that occasional sporadic outbreaks would occur (both from quarantine failures and the very long tail of asymptomatic or pre-clinical carriers). There is still no recognition that the need for this retreat indicates that the current level of opening up is already unsustainable. It implies that governments are following public health advice to ensure the hospitals do not get overwhelmed. Today’s announcement of additional postcodes returning to stage 3 restrictions and a total lockdown for 3,000 people in public housing could be encouraging:

One case total lockdown australias lessons