Hard lessons to learn from Melbourne’s Covid clusters

In managing the nation’s first significant outbreak of COVID-19 after the initial phase of the disease earlier in the year, governments, health professionals and commentators need to approach the problem with cool heads and warm hearts. While it appeared to many a few weeks ago that Australia had coronavirus beaten, Scott Morrison, the national cabinet and the Australian Health Protection Principal Committee warned repeatedly that the recovery process was likely to see spasmodic spikes of the disease. The daily tally of new cases in Victoria — 165 on Thursday, the second-highest after Tuesday’s record of 191 — is disheartening. Painful and costly as the six-week lockdown of metropolitan Melbourne and the Mitchell Shire will be for Victoria and for the nation, there is no suggestion from health authorities that it is unnecessary. From a small base a month ago, the caseload threatened to get out of hand. And this is unlikely to be the last such spike. The situation has highlighted the need to better manage future outbreaks. The errors and systemic shortcomings that have emerged must be remedied.

One of the most important, as Yoni Bashan reports on Friday, is that Victorian health officials did not adhere to national guidelines for COVID-19 contact tracing. These specify close contacts should be followed up daily for flu-like symptoms. The breakdown contributed to the spread of the virus that led to a lockdown of metropolitan Melbourne. Another major problem is a shortage of public health professionals trained to undertake contact tracing in Victoria. The shortage impeded efforts to slow down the accelerating rate of infections. The federal Department of Health is organising an additional 200 public health professionals from other states to help Victoria out. It is a base all jurisdictions need to cover. Queensland has been proactive, giving skilled staff from other areas of the public sector, such as libraries, online training to undertake tracing if the need arises.

If lockdowns are to be avoided in the event of future spikes, such serious errors must be avoided. Tuesday night’s debacle, when 48 passengers from a Jetstar flight from Melbourne left Sydney Airport without being screened and cleared, was another prime example. So was the Andrews government’s irresponsible failure to supervise private security operators overseeing hotel quarantine. The link between Melbourne’s two main clusters — in housing commission flats in the inner northwest and the city’s largest Islamic school — shows more must be done to ensure all cultural groups do their part in preventing virus outbreaks.

But in context, the bigger picture shows there is no need for panic or extreme measures that would prolong the economic fallout from COVID-19 unnecessarily. Protecting the economy, a major determinant of quality of life, and our ability to care for the sick and vulnerable, is vital. The coronavirus is highly contagious, debilitating and dangerous, especially for the elderly and those with pre-existing health conditions. Of 8845 COVID-19 cases diagnosed so far, the virus has killed 106 Australians. Most of its victims have been aged 70 to 90. In comparison, last year was a bad flu year, with 310,000 confirmed cases and more than 800 deaths in Australia — also predominantly among the elderly. That said, the Swedish system of so-called “herd immunity” that has resulted in 5482 deaths from 73,858 cases — in a country with fewer than half of Australia’s population — is not a viable alternative approach.

Advocates such as the Grattan Institute, calling for the replacement of Australia’s suppression strategy with one of elimination, like New Zealand, would do the nation no favours if their wishes were followed. New Zealand, with five million people in an area a third of the size of NSW, had little choice but to opt for elimination. Its supply of intensive care beds had fallen for 20 years before the pandemic, leaving it behind Australia and other comparable nations.

Australia has done well in equipping our hospitals to cope with an influx of serious COVID-19 cases. Medical experts agree that our fatality rate, one of the lowest in the world, reflects our high testing rates and the fact Australian hospitals have not been overwhelmed. Our CFR rate — the ratio between confirmed deaths and confirmed COVID-19 cases — is 1.19 per cent. Britain’s rate is 15.44 per cent. Italy’s CFR is 15 per cent and the US rate is 4 per cent.

The situation in Victoria, regrettably, has necessitated the stop-start-stop pattern of recovery the Prime Minister wanted the economy to avoid. As cases of the virus top 12 million around the world, with 550,000 deaths, lessons learned in Melbourne must be applied as Australians learn to live with the virus, as safely as possible.