Gladys Berejiklian and Kerry Chant are battling the virus unleashed by Victoria
Victorian Premier Dan Andrews won’t answer reasonable questions about his state’s COVID-19 outbreaks, but this week we learned just how far NSW officials will go to stop the spread here, writes Anna Caldwell.
Opinion
Don't miss out on the headlines from Opinion. Followed categories will be added to My News.
The Andrews government of Victoria has failed not only its own people, but the people of NSW in its bungled handling of COVID-19.
This fact was laid bare this week in a short email of advice to Chief Health Officer Kerry Chant just after 4pm on Tuesday.
The email dealt purely in science — and not in blame.
But the words were clear: The first four instances of genomic sequencing conducted in NSW’s latest outbreak confirmed this state was bearing the brunt of a COVID strain we’d never seen before.
It was Victoria’s strain.
NSW Health Minister Brad Hazzard is adamant that he does not wish to criticise Victoria, or lay any blame at the feet hardworking health staff in any state.
But NSW residents, such as pub owners who now face tougher restrictions because of the outbreak, or residents of southwest Sydney who are now banned from travelling to Queensland, might not be so kind.
This Victorian strain of the virus is for some reason particularly virulent, with viral loads so high that victims fall ill within as little as a day, crashing right through the 14-day incubation period seen in previous iterations.
The news that the virus seen in NSW had spread from Victoria came as a relief to NSW authorities.
Commonsense made them suspect a Victorian spread was at play, but the science confirmed that so far this new spate of the virus was not the result of latent community transmission in NSW they had missed.
Meanwhile, in Victoria, latent community transmission had been under way for weeks before it became completely unmissable in the past fortnight, racking up hundreds of new cases a day.
And – despite this virus being very good at spreading – there can be no doubt that the blame for that lands squarely at the door of Premier Dan Andrews.
The hotel quarantine bungle in Victoria, where they elected to entrust the country’s health to jumped-up security with as little as five minutes training, has been widely canvassed.
We know the tales about trading sexual favours and mingling between guards and people meant to be quarantining.
But this week, for the first time, Victoria’s chief health officer said it was “conceivable absolutely” that every case in that state stemmed from the hotel quarantine failings.
He said he had used “pretty colourful language” when the genomic link was first made.
And who can blame him? An entirely preventable outbreak had started essentially at the hands of the government.
We also learned this week that Victorian bureaucrats were warned within 24 hours of the hotel quarantine program beginning that security guards were not properly equipped for the important work, and fielded requests for police to take over 24/7.
This, of course, is the approach NSW took, with police front and centre.
Victoria, though, despite the warnings, pressed on with security guards, even after second warning email was sent on March 30.
What is even more stunning than this apparent head-in-the-sand approach is that now, as the state is overcome with the virus, Premier Andrews won’t answer questions about the mess that got him here.
He’s asked a retired judge to investigate the hotel quarantine debacle, but is hiding behind that very inquiry to avoid answering questions.
“We will let the inquiry do its work, our focus remains on containing this virus,” is his oft-repeated response.
That’s not a good enough response for the people of Victoria, and it’s not a good enough response for the people of NSW where we are now suffering the effects of the virus spread into this state.
We now face pubs being threatened with fines and shutdowns and the possibility of heavier restrictions on our way of life, including at restaurants and cafes.
When NSW pubs were limited this week to 300 people as a response to the Crossroads outbreak, there were some in Premier Gladys Berejiklian’s inner circle who wanted to take things even further.
But Ministers like John Barilaro, Victor Dominello and Dominic Perrottet do not want to see any undue impact on businesses.
What this week has also exposed is just how far NSW is ahead of our southern counterparts.
Within the space of just days, Dr Chant and her team have used sophisticated contact tracing to map this virus right across the state.
There are things being done in NSW to track this virus most of us don’t even know about.
On Thursday Dr Chant confirmed that even sewage systems were being tested to see if there were hot spots we weren’t aware of.
Her specific, daily updates, which outline precisely where each case has been, and swift action to clean and close down places of risk has, in fact, saved all of us.
In contrast, Victoria allowed small case numbers to creep and creep upon themselves, ending up in the most dire of circumstances.
The Prime Minister yesterday praised NSW for essentially proving that an outbreak can be contained with hard contact tracing work and localised responses, without locking down the entire state.
“In NSW, I am encouraged by the information and news that I’m getting from the Premier there and from the Health Minister,” he said.
“In New South Wales they have moved incredibly quickly, I think, to do the detective work on what has happened at the Crossroads Hotel, which will always be known both literally and I think figuratively by its name.
“That demonstrates I think in New South Wales how effectively the states can respond to this, and the best protection against the virus, to live with the virus, to live alongside the virus, and to open up your economy — you don’t protect your economy by continually shutting things down.”
The PM acknowledged that Victoria got itself to a point where it had no choice but to lockdown again, which is a shame for the people of that state.
But it’s just possible that NSW has proven this week that it didn’t need to get that far.
The brutal reality of such a time of war is that you can be a hero one day, and a failure the next.
This week, all we have seen in NSW has been heroes. And for that we should be grateful, while still bracing for the possibility of future wrong turns.