Coronavirus Australia: The Victoria contact tracing questions media asked Daniel Andrews

Daniel Andrews has faced a grilling as contact tracing’s role in Victoria’s second wave comes under the microscope. Here’s what he had to say.

Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews addresses the media at the daily COVID update. Picture: Andrew Henshaw/NCA NewsWire

The Australian: Why has it taken five months of the pandemic for you to get to this stage? We’ve had questions raised months ago about how, compared with other states, Victoria didn’t have that localised capability. Why has it taken so long to develop it?

Daniel Andrews: This comes into its own when numbers are very low, and that’s the position we’re moving into now.

Oz: The numbers were low between the first and second wave.

DA: Indeed. This is about continuous improvement. It’s not about saying that, you know, there isn’t an opportunity to do better. It’s looking for those – and often, often, it will be very, very small improvements, but the lower the numbers get, the lower your tolerance and threshold for error, the margin for error gets so slim that it’s then appropriate to devolve, and that’s exactly what we’re doing … So I think that just as regional teams have played a critical role in the low numbers in regional Victoria now, and keeping them low, suburban public health teams, coronavirus response teams, will be a very important part of that final push to get the numbers right down and of course to keep them there.

Oz: That still doesn’t explain why you didn’t do that three months ago before we experienced …

DA: Well, this second wave is very different to the first wave, very, very different.

Oz: But you could have prevented the severity of the second wave by implementing some of these things then.

DA: I don’t accept that. I don’t accept that at all. The key point here is with the amount of community transmission that we’ve got, with the amount of cases that we had, a more centralised model worked, and that’s not a matter of my opinion. We’ve gone from 725 cases to 41 yesterday, 55 today. That’s a strategy that’s working. That’s a strategy that, it’s full of sacrifice, it’s full of a lot of hard work from many, many people and, again, I’m deeply grateful to everyone who is playing their part, but I don’t accept that view. This is now the time to do this, but there may be other things that I am not announcing today. There may be other things that become clear, that there would be a benefit and we’d always reserve the right to make further announcements, refinements.

Journalist: Back on Rachel’s point, at the start of the pandemic, like right at the beginning, before things got out of control in the first wave, Professor Brett Sutton had lauded New South Wales’s decentralised system and (said) that that was a good thing. So we have known for a very long time, even before the first wave, that a decentralised system would potentially help in being able to contact trace and suppress the spread of the virus, so why has it taken five months to actually implement it?

DA: Because the judgement was not made that it would deliver a significant dividend when you had cases at 700 per day …

Journalist: Professor Sutton …

DA: Well, you’ll need to speak to him about those comments. I’m not here to interpret what he may or may not have said, with the greatest of respect. In terms of when a devolved model is of its most utility, its greatest benefit, it is not when you’ve got 700 cases.

Oz: Premier, we didn’t have 700 cases back in June. We had days of zero. Are you saying that this localised system that you’re introducing now, these improvements, wouldn’t have been useful then?

DA: Well, it’s not a matter of me trying to interpret what might have been useful or not in a very different wave three or four months ago.

Oz: No, I’m talking about the beginning of the second wave. I’m asking whether it would have been useful in prevention of the extent of the second wave.

DA: Well, that was not the advice. I just want to make the point, when you are about making continuous improvement, then that’s exactly what you have to do, and that’s not about digging in and saying, ‘well this is perfect and it can’t get any better’. That, I don’t think would be a very productive way to go. What instead we’ve done, is at different phases of this pandemic, as it has presented, we have employed different tactics, a different strategy, done things differently. For instance, we weren’t doorknocking right at the beginning of the second wave, but very soon thereafter we knew that that was an issue, and that making sure that everybody was where they were supposed to be, but also to provide support, information, that was a useful thing to do. So what is appropriate, what is effective at one point, isn’t necessarily, doesn’t necessarily hold for very long, and that’s why you always have to look for those improvements.