A looming disaster and a quarantine botch

Twenty days ago, there was a family celebration to celebrate Victoria’s first day with zero COVID-19 cases.

Unfortunately, the hope provided by two days early this month with no new COVID-19 case in Victoria has been crushed by rapid community spread of the virus at a time when the rest of Australia has not seen locally sourced transmission for a long time. Despite the rapid spread – which is practically certain to exceed Victoria’s peak of 111 reported cases per day late in March – the Andrews Government is preceding with the opening of major libraries and museums for the school holidays. These school holidays, which finish on Sunday 12 July, are critical for the finances of economically crippled cultural institutions such as the State Library and the Melbourne Museum. It is also true that some precautions are being taken to reduce the risk of transmission of COVID-19 inside these claustrophobic building environments.

If COVID-19 cases in Victoria grow at the rate they have over the past fortnight – from a daily average of three coronavirus cases in Victoria a fortnight ago to 23 today – they would rise to 176 cases per day over the coming fortnight to end on 10 July, and to 1,351 cases per day over the first fortnight of the scheduled school term, which ends on 24 July. Given that testing is steady at around 20,000 tests per day over the past three days, and tends to peak on Thursdays and Fridays when people are most often at facilities in major shopping centres, 1,351 cases per day would mean that 6.75 percent of Melburnians have COVID-19.

Such a situation would mean that Melbourne – though likely not rural Victoria where there is no community transmission – would return to the strict lockdown from between 17 March and the late May. Most likely the state government would be eager to maintain a much longer lockdown than the ten weeks seen last autumn, in order to ensure that COVID-19 really does get eliminated from the state. Security would require that the severest restrictions remain until four weeks after the last new COVID-19 infection, to ensure that the virus has completely gone. Such would mean that restrictions would be returned to the highest level – or higher than last autumn – and last until well after the ordinary September holidays, and most likely not being removed or even relaxed until November or even December. Whilst such a long lockdown might remove COVID-19 from Melbourne to a reasonable degree, it would be certainly horribly frustrating for a population already not wishing to see restrictions upon movement re-imposed.

For politicians who are awfully vacillating rather than acting decisively, a re-imposed lockdown is feared as costing votes, unlike in the German state of Nordrhein-Westfallen, where a lockdown has been re-imposed without opposition two days ago upon 400,000 people after an infection in a meatpacking facility. This is what Victoria needed to do in the Cities of Brimbank and Maribyrnong as soon as the Cedar Meats cluster was detected.

It is popularly thought that the reason why Victoria alone amongst Australian states is suffering community transmission of COVID-19 is luck. This is patently wrong. The reality is that there is no accident behind why Victoria is the only state with community COVID transmission:

1. The source of most of Victoria’s current community COVID-19 transmission is almost certainly from security guards in quarantine hotels, most critically the Rydges and the Stamford Plaza
2. Most people in quarantine are recent migrants who travelled abroad to visit near relatives on urgent family matters
3. Western Australia, South Australia, Tasmania, Queensland and the Territories are home to a very small proportion of recent migrants, and essentially none live in rural areas
4. Most critically, in New South Wales army personnel and medical staff were used to strictly enforce quarantine. Contrariwise, in Victoria security guards with no medical knowledge were used to enforce quarantine

The result is that COVID spread from those in quarantine to immigrant communities chiefly in Melbourne’s western suburbs, but has remained inside quarantine in New South Wales and has essentially disappeared from rural areas and from other states. There is a severe lesson exactly analogous to the one I noted about the absence of quarantine for travellers from tropical Asia at the start of the pandemic here: that strict and properly-enforced quarantine is the best way to stop disease spreading. Both the Victorian Government and the World Health Organisation appear yet to learn this lesson.