Coronavirus: Daniel Andrews faces huge test to avoid fallout

Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews must avoid a repeat of 2020. Picture: Getty

Daniel Andrews has jammed on the brakes to allow his contact tracers to catch up.

This is a deeply political response to a potential health crisis confronting a quarter of the national economy and is symptomatic of doubts about the ability to track down the virus.

While it appears the contact tracing system has improved since last year, there is anxiety that Victoria risks returning to a long-term shutdown of its economy — which explains the key motivation for the cabinet decision.

Better to slow down and stop the movement of the virus than to be silently overrun by it in the next month.

Further, just because a state like NSW seems to work more efficiently doesn’t mean that Victoria has to make suicidal decisions that lead to disastrous consequences.

This is not what the electorate is looking for.

To that end, Andrews will live or die politically on his ability to prevent a repeat of 2020, so the shutdown is further evidence of his overt pragmatism.

At the heart of the Victorian Premier’s defence is that Australia is now dealing with a much more virulent strain of the virus.

It was, he said, one thing for NSW to smash its way through an earlier breakout with a more benign strain, quite another to have done so while dealing with this UK iteration.

The global evidence is that he is right in expressing these concerns.

It is important to start from the position that neither Andrews nor chief health officer Brett Sutton wanted to be there on Friday, but this so-called circuit-breaking lockdown is highly significant for both men.

Having overseen one caseload blowout, it would be beyond careless to be responsible for a second.

Until this latest setback, Labor in Victoria has been flying, with the state Coalition starting to cannibalise itself in the knowledge that Andrews had emerged from the long shutdown politically stronger.

This strength will not last if the virus gallops across the suburbs.

There was a genuine sense of dread across the metropolis when word spread of the five-day shutdown, millions of people having just recently been smashed emotionally by one of the world’s longest lockdowns.

This will make it a big test for police and the wider community. It is hard to see Victorians submitting with the same level of enthusiasm that they did in 2020, but Australians have proven to be a surprisingly compliant lot.

For hospitality and retail, the five-day sentence will hurt in ways that will belie the comparative shortness of the lockdown.

Valentine’s Day revenue will be severely diminished and there will be a bottom-line price to pay for weeks or months.

The shutdown hits just as Melbourne’s CBD was showing signs of a mini-resurrection, workers slowly returning to their city desks and people gaining in confidence that the virus was slowly being contained.

This confidence will once again be battered and the stronger the rhetoric from Andrews and the CHO on the dangers of the UK virus, the less people will be wanting to expose themselves to sickness.

It’s the great Catch-22 of 2021.