Coronavirus: Medical test awaits bloodied but unbowed Daniel Andrews …

Daniel Andrews finishes Lockdown 3.0 diminished but not broken.

He loses the short-term political battle but has the opportunity now to thoroughly reset his COVID-19 agenda, which will have at its core plans for a quarantine facility outside the CBD.

His next real, and maybe most substantial, battle will be with the medical establishment, which has previously largely backed the Victorian Premier.

Now, for the first time in a meaningful sense, senior medical figures are wondering out loud whether Labor is up to running the hotel quarantine system.

The significance of this should not be underestimated.

Debates over the nebuliser and the mind-numbing ins and outs of who infected whom have their place, but in a substantive sense they are a sideshow.

The Andrews government now lives or dies according to the strength of the hotel quarantine system.

The Victorian Premier is being transparent when he says further lockdowns are possible.

Indeed, on Wednesday the clearest message from the press conference was that further lockdowns were probably likely.

Andrews has a long history with the health portfolio, going back nearly 20 years.

Like most sensible people, he listens to medical advice.

And yet there is discomfort in the Andrews government about whether the public health team is too cautious, and whether the government should look to borrowing from the NSW experience and trying to tough it out when small outbreaks occur.

If you believe the Andrews rhetoric, NSW hasn’t yet been tested thoroughly by the UK strain of the virus.

While the UK virus is scientifically more dangerous, Lockdown 3.0 would suggest that the nuclear strength implications Andrews warned of were slightly beaten up.

Andrews stressed on Wednesday that he would not be ignoring the medical advice, which is principally from the Chief Health Officer, professor Brett Sutton.

Sutton is not much loved within parts of the government and there are those who are wondering whether it’s time that role changed.

Fundamentally, though, the answers lie in hotel quarantine and whether people have faith in the new, post-inquiry system.

Perhaps the best outcome is that the new quarantine village is built within weeks, carving a clearer path towards a new, safer normal.

For no one sensible could suggest Victoria is on top of hotel quarantine — and that’s an indictment of Victorian Labor, given the number of lives lost in 2020.