Melbourne is a burnt-out case.
The Lockdown 4.0 restrictions will slowly peter out but there can be no confidence that Victoria will avoid a return to a fifth shutdown.
Wednesday’s announcement amounts to a Clayton’s relaxation of the rules, with some loosening but still a tight hold on movement and trading hours.
It is further evidence of the onerous layers of bureaucratic red tape that prevents quick changes, including, for example, the return of most children to school on Thursday.
Instead, they and their parents must wait a day for no visible health reason, just a requirement to shuffle paper.
The fundamental issue remains that the Victorian government can’t get hotel quarantine right.
That means the virus is odds-on to leak back into the community. Without buckets of luck, it can’t be any other way.
The political defence for this is that what might have worked (which it didn’t) at the start of the pandemic is totally unfit for 2021 and was never going to go the full distance.
It will probably be years before the effects of the pandemic are over.
The Andrews government is right when it argues the vaccine rollout has been too slow and Canberra prevaricated on alternative quarantine systems.
But what is required in this rolling crisis is for Victoria to fix its leaky quarantine system and it has shown no signs of being able to do so.
Both acting premier James Merlino and Chief Health Office Brett Sutton sought to deflect questioning about hotel quarantine on Wednesday and who can really blame them?
Millions of dollars have been thrown at the system but still there are relentless errors and weird shortcomings that commonsense says should have been fixed.
It’s been widely reported that the quarantine hotel behind the spread of the Delta outbreak was not up to the job.
While quarantine in Adelaide sparked the original Lockdown 4.0 problems in Melbourne, the leaking of the Delta strain added a layer of panic that contributed to the shutdown’s longevity.
A reasonable person could form the view that what has happened in the past will keep happening in the future.
You might call it hotel quarantine’s insanity conundrum.
The best that can be said for Victoria is that the broad feedback suggests that the state has finally got its act together on contact tracing.
But the reality is, no matter how good that contact tracing is becoming, if the virus keeps leaking, it will spread.
At some point, that will mean Sutton will hit the skids again and invoke another lockdown.
It is hard to see it ending up any other way.
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