James Merlino sounded less Dan Andrews, more Gladys Berejiklian
If five locally acquired cases had broken out a few months ago Melbourne would probably have lurched into lockdown. So what’s changed?
Patrick Carlyon
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Here we go again.
Masks and limits are likely to dominate Melbourne until the end of next week.
But it feels kinder this time.
Are the iron bars of control – from curfews and travel limits - no longer the reflexive response to the first signs of a positive?
The language of Acting Premier James Merlino sounded measured: “proportional”, “reasonable”, “appropriate”.
There was no talk of a third wave. He did not warn that the spread may get worse before it gets better.
This a welcome shift, a belated change of tack.
Finally, we are being told, we may be entitled to trust in the system.
If five locally acquired cases had broken out a few months ago, Melbourne would probably have lurched into lockdown.
Much as other states do, such as Western Australia, when someone gets a sniffle.
Merlino, along with Health Minister Martin Foley, followed obvious talking points.
They grounded the rules in a prevailing motivation – to let the contact tracers do their job.
It wasn’t always like this.
Victoria’s 2020 record of contact tracing was poor compared with other states.
The Health Department was under-resourced and reliant on archaic and often discrete systems for tracing.
When numbers spiralled after last July, tracers were overwhelmed.
The virus was conquering Victoria.
Victoria had to build its tracing capacity while buried in the crisis of new and complex clusters, as if building a plane, as someone said, while it was flying.
Recent weeks have reflected a far better effort. The speed and detail of “exposure sites” looks more complete.
Leaders are openly placing their trust in tracing efforts, apparently confident that targeted strategies and systems – as opposed to blanket lockdowns – can minimise harm.
Compare it to February when, in announcing a five-day lockdown, Premier Dan Andrews spoke of a “circuit breaker” to arrest local transmissions, which later tipped into double figures.
He acted out of an “abundance of caution” amid fears of a third wave.
Contact tracing is still imperfect in Victoria.
A listed exposure site of Woolworths Epping was mistaken – it should have been the Epping North Woolworths.
It was an understandable error – a bank app recipe was used to identify the site.
The bad news was the unnecessary impact on those who had visited Woolworths Epping.
It took two weeks to fix the mistake.
The good news was that the error was fixed – and publicised – after further testing of waste water prompted a return to the provided data.
There may be other cases in the community.
Craigieburn train line passengers on trips in and away from the city on May 7 journey may throw up new patterns of spread.
Yet Merlino was not warning of harsher measures on Tuesday.
He wasn’t hectoring us to do the right thing.
He was less Andrews and more NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian, who has consistently minimised disruptions as a high priority.
Has Merlino put away the political Sword of Damocles under which we have lived for so long?
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