Experts shoot down Victorian government’s ‘alarmist’ claims about virus spread

The Victorian government’s claims a covid strain is spreading in faster and unexpected ways is being seriously doubted by experts.

Health experts have serious doubts over claims made by the Victorian government that the covid strain spreading in Melbourne is transmitting in faster and unexpected ways.

On more than one occasion this week, Victorian officials have described the new “Kappa” variant in the state as an “absolute beast” — saying it is passing between people on only “fleeting contact” with one another. They claimed it could be passed on by merely brushing past a stranger in a shop.

Yesterday, the state’s chief health officer Brett Sutton went further saying one person was infected at an indoor enclosed space “two hours after an infectious case had left”.

“(It) was therefore a substantial period of time but they had left two hours before the next exposed individual came in who has become a case,” he said. “That’s in the kind of measles category of infectiousness.”

RELATED: Victoria extends lockdown for seven days

The Victorian Chief Health Officer, Brett Sutton, discusses the extended lockdown in Melbourne. Picture: Daniel Pockett/Getty Images

All 60 cases in the current Victorian outbreak involve the Indian B1617.1 strain, now known as the Kappa variant.

However, the claims have been seriously disputed by a number of health experts — who say the Victorian government has reverted to “alarmist or doomsday-type” language.

Professor Greg Dore, an infectious diseases expert at the University of New South Wales, said it was wrong to say the strain was as infectious as measles and that it was spreading exponentially in Melbourne.

He said the strain spreads “like other variants”, including through aerosol transmission, with some exposures in short-duration indoor settings. He said it had the potential to spread exponentially, as all the variants can.

Things kappa (B.1.617.1) strain is NOT:
🦠 spreading exponentially in Melbourne
🦠 as infectious as delta (B.1.617.2)
🦠 measles (R=12-18)
Spreads like other variants, including through aerosol transmission, w/ some exposures short-duration indoor. On @abc730 tonight to discuss.

— Greg Dore (@GregDore2) June 2, 2021

University of Melbourne Professor James McCaw, an infectious disease expert and member of the Australian Health Protection Principal Committee, which advises the national cabinet, said this was not supported by the data he had seen.

“There is no epidemiological evidence that this virus spreads faster,” he told Nine Newspapers “There is no clear reason to think this virus is spreading in different ways.

“We need to be very cautious. We are on an absolute knife-edge in Victoria about whether we bring this under control rapidly or it develops further. But I don’t think it is helpful to seed alarmist or doomsday-type thoughts into the community.”

Australian National University infectious diseases ­expert Professor Peter Collignon said the Indian strain was not “behaving” in a drastically different way.

“In retrospect, they should have used different language that doesn’t provoke a level of fear that is higher than justified by the data at the time,” he told the Herald Sun.

“We have been through this before; this virus is not behaving in an unexpected or much more infectious way than what we have seen before.”

Lost count of how many infectious diseases specialist I’ve spoken to today - 6 or 7 - they all dispute the Victorian government’s repeated definitive claims of “fleeting”, “low contact” and “much faster” transmission and say great care must be taken in how spread is communicated.

— Melissa Davey (@MelissaLDavey) June 2, 2021

The Guardian’s medical editor Melissa Davey said she’d lost count of how many infectious diseases specialists she’d spoken to who disputed the Victorian government’s repeated definitive claims of “fleeting”, “low contact” and “much faster” transmission.

They told her authorities must put great care into how the spread is communicated.

Deakin University epidemiologist Catherine Bennett said many of the “fleeting” transmissions described by the government – cases inside a South Melbourne Telstra shop, a Port Melbourne cafe and a Mickleham display home – most probably involved people sharing a confined space for a long amount of time.

She toldThe Agethe bigger story was that the virus, which has been genomically traced to a man who checked out of a quarantine hotel in Adelaide on May 4, had been in the community for four weeks and not produced an exponential growth in cases.

Victorian Labor fans have hit out at the criticism on social media saying the experts and journalists reporting on their opinions are “undermining the public health response”.

Yesterday, Prof Sutton conceded the Kappa variant was not as infectious as the related Delta Indian variant, but he stood by his description of the strain as “a beast” presenting a greater risk than anything the state had faced in 2020.

Professor Sutton said there was another case where the virus had showed up “in places where normally it would be likely”.

“So the Brighton Beach Hotel, that was an outdoor dining setting, well ventilated, you wouldn’t expect transmission to occur,” he said.

“We still had it as an exposure site, we still informed people to test and isolate until returning a negative, but in fact all of those people will need to be in quarantine because transmission has occurred there.

“That’s not something that we routinely see and we didn’t routinely see it in 2020, but we have to bear in mind that all the variants of concern now are really a step up to some degree.

“This variant is not the most infectious, but it is more infectious than anything we saw in the beginning and middle of 2020, so we have to bear that in mind.”

He said at least one in 10 current cases in the 60-case cluster “caught this virus in those casual contact settings” outside the workplace or the family home.

Testing Commander Jeroen Weimar said at least four of the state’s 54 locally transmitted cases have come from “fleeting” contact between Victorians.

“What we’re seeing now is people are brushing past each other in a small shop, they are going to a display home, they are looking at photos in a Telstra shop,” he said.

“This is relatively speaking, relatively fleeting. They do not know each other’s names, and that is very different from what we have been before.

“This is stranger to stranger transmission.”

A report by the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control, which answers to the World Health Organisation, listed Delta as a variant of concern and Kappa only a variant of interest.

Variants of concern show evidence of increased transmissibility, more severe disease and reduced ­effectiveness of treatments or vaccines, whereas variants of interest may not offer enough evidence to suggest the same.