Daniel Andrews’ hard line on COVID: Could we have lived with more risk?

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As premier of Victoria, Daniel Andrews tried to defeat COVID-19 with overwhelming force.

Locking down hard even in response to very low levels of community transmission was the defining decision of his pandemic management.

Daniel Andrews arrives for the daily COVID briefing on July 31, 2020 in Melbourne.Credit: Darrian Traynor

And with the news that Andrews will stand down as leader of Victoria, where you stand on the wisdom of that approach – how much risk we should have accepted – should define how you view his pandemic premiership.

All Australian states applied a similar broad-brush approach in the early days of the pandemic: block the virus getting into the community, and stamp it out when it does get in.

That made the key danger point the state borders – where the premiers’ responsibilities started.

We reported endlessly on the many problems with Victoria’s hotel quarantine setup, which may have contributed to the repeated quarantine breaches. Andrews and his government must take responsibility for this.

But – and this is a big but – viewing the breaches of hotel quarantine and the resulting outbreaks as the defining element of Andrews’ pandemic management misses the bigger picture, I think.

Sydney had quarantine leaks. Adelaide had quarantine leaks (one even caused a lockdown in … Melbourne!). Perth and Brisbane had quarantine leaks. Arguably, leaks are baked into the system when you’re using non-purpose built facilities to try to contain a respiratory virus.

In Victoria, these leaks led to significant outbreaks. In other states, they did not.

Quiet streets: Melbourne during a lockdown in October 2021.Credit: Eddie Jim

Public health professionals and journalists – including me – spent months arguing over why this might be. Some suggestions seem plausible, such as an underinvestment in public health in Victoria. Poor contact tracing was an issue with some outbreaks but not others. Other suggestions seem less plausible, such as Victoria having more public transport than NSW.

This is natural. Humans are hard-wired to see patterns and causality; we don’t want to accept that our lives are subject to random chance.

Infectious diseases such as COVID-19 are “stochastic” – random. We saw this in the models built to predict Victoria’s epidemic trajectories.

“What our models say is that sometimes the infections burn out naturally, because people who are infected don’t come into contact with anyone or just stay in their house. And sometimes it takes off,” Dr Jason Thompson, a University of Melbourne modeller who worked on the Victorian government’s epidemic modelling, told me in mid-2021.

“People talk about the stochastic, or random, nature of these things, and that’s it. Occasionally it takes off, and occasionally it dies off.”

I remain somewhat sceptical that quarantine leaks turning into community COVID outbreaks can be entirely slated to the Andrews government, or to human agency in general.

But locking down was entirely a decision of Andrews and his colleagues. This decision – to put saving lives above any other outcome – is the defining feature of Andrews’ management of the pandemic.

Even as Jason Thompson was telling me in 2021 that we couldn’t know if the latest run of infections would turn into an outbreak, Andrews was announcing a snap lockdown.

Andrews and his chief health officer Brett Sutton.Credit: Eddie Jim

During those lockdowns – which evidence suggests do work to prevent transmission – the virus was brought to heel.

But lockdowns come with many harms. Perhaps the most contentious decision was to close schools against public health advice; there is evidence that school closures have done irreparable damage to our kids’ education.

Playgrounds and beaches were also closed, even when it was clear there was limited risk of transmission outdoors.

We allowed fear to blind us to the science; we put fear of the virus before our responsibility to care for our children.

COVID-19 is lethal for older Australians, but less so for younger ones (depending on your view on reinfection and long-COVID risk). Uncontrolled spread in an unvaccinated population is disastrous. It poses a major risk to everyone when health systems are overwhelmed.

At times, Victoria locked down to prevent what appeared to be runaway transmission – when hundreds of cases were being recorded every day. But at other times, the population remained locked down when community transmission was minimal.

Melbourne spent many days in lockdown when the state was recording less than 10 new cases. On some days in lockdown, there were no cases recorded. The approach to lockdowns seemed to grow more severe even as hospitals improved their ability to treat the ill and as tools – such as masks – became widely available to slow the spread.

In essence, the approach was to try to stop a few cases of the virus spreading by placing millions of people in lockdown.

On balance, could we have safely accepted a higher level of transmission for fewer restrictions? Could we have lived with more risk and attempted a more precision-focused public health response – perhaps avoiding lockdown but closing sites where there was a known risk of spreading the virus? Could we have been more aggressive in ending lockdowns at the first opportunity? That depends on your risk appetite.

But Andrews, and his former chief health officer Brett Sutton, have never made any apologies about putting public health ahead any other consideration. And he was re-elected emphatically in 2022, with an increased majority.

Liam Mannix’s Examine newsletter explains and analyses science with a rigorous focus on the evidence. Sign up to get it each week.