Susie O’Brien: It’s cruel for Andrews to set bar out of restrictions so high
Premier Daniel Andrews’ road map out of lockdown offers too little, too late and comes at the detriment of the sanity and livelihoods of many people, writes Susie O’Brien.
Susie O'Brien
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Premier Daniel Andrews’ road map out of lockdown is a document of despair and desperation, chaos and confusion.
It offers too little, too late and comes at the detriment of the sanity and livelihoods of many people.
The state’s COVID-19 case numbers are dropping and we’ve had the lowest daily number of new cases since June, with outbreaks restricted to six Victorian postcodes north and west of the city. Even the Premier admitted there had been “considerable success”.
And yet all Victorians across the metropolitan area continue to be equally subject to some of the hardest, most draconian lockdown measures in the world. Five million people in this city have endured 100 consecutive days of lockdown since early July, and there’s little end in sight.
The ongoing restrictions are cruel and oppressive and bear little relevance to the scope or location of ongoing outbreaks.
Our control-freak Premier is taking a hard-line approach to make up for his past mistakes. Sunday’s announcement was full of nonsensical, heavy-handed rules based on targets that are unlikely to be met, and not because of people’s lack of co-operation.
Ongoing restrictions that keep people in their homes and businesses closed are pointless if the health system isn’t doing its job.
Contact tracing, for instance is still 93 per cent, not 100 per cent. That means seven out of 100 people are still not being told they’re close contacts within 24 hours. What if just one of those people has the disease and works in aged care and drives an Uber on weekends? It could be catastrophic.
We’re doing our part, so why is it so hard for health officials to do theirs? The measures set the bar too high, offering little hope we will ever get there.
October 26 is the magic date many businesses will reopen, and the date for a staged return of school students from years three to 10 (others having returned for term four). But that will only happen if the average number of new cases falls below five and there are fewer than five unknown source cases. By November we need zero cases for 14 days.
We haven’t seen numbers like that anywhere in the world after a second wave. So what hope do we have of achieving that here? We’ve come a long way, but this seems impossible. It is mean to make opening up so conditional on things largely outside our control.
Experts such as Prof Nancy Baxter, of Melbourne University’s School of Population and Global Health, say the key to meeting these deadlines will be controlling outbreaks in aged care and healthcare settings.
None of this has anything whatsoever to do with people in low-risk areas taking their kids to the beach, letting primary kids return to school, letting sick people get elective surgery or allowing restaurants to offer socially-distanced dining. And yet the road map won’t let us do any of these things for many weeks to come.
There is also little relationship between the ongoing lockdown provisions and the spread and concentration of the cases. Cases so far have been overwhelmingly linked to aged care and healthcare settings and industrial businesses, yet the measures are focused on curtailing the daily movements of all Melburnians.
Prof Catherine Bennett, head of epidemiology at Deakin University, said the government should not have used a generic data model, but specific modelling based on Victoria’s circumstances. That would make sense and enable us to tailor restrictions to areas and industries with the most cases.
Why not let all kids go back to class given schools are deemed safe? Why not let individual people look inside a house they want to buy to allow the real estate industry to restart? Why not allow cafes, restaurants and shops to operate on a modified basis? It will make no difference to COVID numbers and would help pull the rest of us from the brink of depression and bankruptcy.
Surely these things are a priority above working out how to allow people to attend the Spring Racing Carnival, which is now on the government’s agenda.
Racing? Really?
Prof Sutton said on Sunday the alternative to the road map provisions was “too awful to contemplate”. But the reality is bloody awful too.
It’s not enough for the Premier to dangle the carrot of a COVID-normal Christmas before us. That’s nearly four months away. Who cares about Christmas when our kids are anxious, our businesses are closing, and our stress levels are sky high right now?
Susie O’Brien is a Herald Sun columnist