Coronavirus quarantine fiasco: It’s all in the numbers for Daniel Andrews

The departure of Victoria’s most senior bureaucrat over the hotel quarantine scandal is a big setback for an increasingly tired and traumatised government.

Chris Eccles, until the second wave, was a stabilising force across the government and in some ways the second most powerful figure behind Daniel Andrews.

While we get Eccles’s resignation, we don’t get the answer a lot of people are looking for. We still don’t know who fathered the security guard debacle because Eccles was blunt in declaring it wasn’t him.

Eccles, former police commissioner Graham Ashton and Emergency Management Commissioner Andrew Crisp are all in danger of featuring prominently in the looming inquiry report.

In the absence of anyone else sticking up their hand, ministers and ministerial staff included, we are galloping towards the report being released in a somewhat foolish fashion. That is, the electorate will have to accept systemic ignorance as the answer to one of Australia’s gravest political and bureaucratic cock-ups.

The Victorian Premier, a relentlessly strategic person, will be looking at this latest resignation through focused political eyes.

Very few voters will know who Eccles is and the majority community focus is on when they will finally be set free. The answer to that is where Andrews is most exposed politically; this is where he will be judged by electorate and colleagues.

The virus numbers are looking more stubborn than Andrews would like and Victoria may fall short of achieving its most ambitious lockdown targets.

Inside government, there are hopes that by the end of this month, the target of average daily cases of fewer than five over the previous two weeks is achievable.

Anything more ambitious than this is looking increasingly difficult and there is a strong enough chance that Andrews will have to lower his expectations.

It is absolutely imperative for him that this exhausting lockdown works or he may as well disappear into the night.

The community, and his caucus, will not tolerate failure.

Andrews went a long way on Monday towards softening up the community for a less idealistic result. In reality, this is probably where it was always going to land, with key experts warning the most ambitious targets were, well, too ambitious. We know the ­national policy is all about suppression and not elimination.

By the time Melbourne is back and firing on all cylinders, it will have to get used to living with the virus and for the sake of community sanity, let’s hope the health department has finally learnt how to track and trace.

The third facet — and threat — facing the government is the creeping sense that an exhausted city is totally over the restrictions.

People in their thousands, particularly those in the highest virus risk group in their 20s, openly flouted the government’s mask wearing laws at the weekend.

The young and the restless look like they have had a guts full.

Who can blame them?