Patrick Carlyon: Zero target furphy standing in the way of hope

Dan Andrews is so hellbent on declaring a victory over Delta — and NSW — that Victorians are becoming pawns in a misplaced crusade.

In Melbourne’s longer lockdown of the second wave of 2020, there was hope.

Back then, it took 53 days to get 113 cases a day down to zero.

That was the Alpha variant, mind.

At a running five-day average of 77 cases, of a Delta variant which is superior of speed and spread, the 2021 effort to get cases to zero might take far longer.

So why are we trying?

Trackers put Victoria’s vaccination rates at 70 per cent on October 31 (62 days from now) and at 80 per cent on November 17 (79 days).

Until they are reached, the price of the Victorian preoccupation with zero cases will grow each day.

The taped-up playgrounds and the curfew are petty measures which have not, as far as we know, spared us a single case.

Premier Dan Andrews has not set a daily case target for the state to exit lockdown. Picture: NCA NewsWire / Wayne Taylor

Kids have not been told when they can return to school. Jittery business owners have no lifeline strategies to plan ahead.

It appears that the zero target furphy stands in the way of clarity, much less hope.

A refusal to look beyond it nods more to the political and personal ambitions of Premier Dan Andrews and Chief Health Officer Brett Sutton than to the science of COVID and its spread.

For what is the end game? To reduce case numbers to zero (which may never happen), then lift harsher restrictions when vaccination targets are met, when cases will rise once again?

Doughnut days used to be a measure of success. But, as with fax machines or analogue phones, the world has moved on. They’re history. There is no going back.

Andrews wants to declare a victory over Delta (and NSW). And we are becoming pawns in a misplaced crusade which invites comparisons with British generals of the Great War.

They believed that sacrificing troops in pointless pursuits served the greater campaign. They were so tethered to dated thinking that their scope of understanding distorted common sense and reality.

That’s where Victoria is now. A road map to nowhere. And the state seems unnecessarily doomed to this path for the weeks and months ahead.