Amid the layers of justification that Daniel Andrews sought to weave for the five-day Victorian lockdown, it was the state’s Chief Health Officer Brett Sutton who cut through the spin.
Asked what the crucial factor was in authorities being able to arrest the spread of the Holiday Inn cluster, he gave a ringing endorsement of the ability of his state’s contact tracing to keep up with the UK variant.
“I think it reinforces that the three-ring principle of protection is the right way to go, and it can deal with variants of concern as well,” Professor Sutton said.
“There are circumstances where you need to pull out other tools — a short, sharp lockdown or a circuit-breaker. But test, trace and isolate I think can deal with variants of concern, if you go broadly, if you go really rapidly, and if you get a great response to testing and good compliance.”
So it turns out contact tracing can keep up with the “hyper-infective” UK strain after all. What, then, are we to make then of Mr Andrews’ claim it moves at “light speed” with a “velocity of transmission” that meant contact tracers couldn’t keep up? There’s only one possible conclusion, and that is the narrative that justified the hard lockdown turned out to be overblown.
The fear had been that by the time they tested positive, infected people had already passed the virus on to their contacts before authorities had time to ring-fence those contacts. That was the key reason given for the lockdown.
As it turned out, the contact tracers were able to keep up, and they passed their biggest test since Melbourne’s second wave with flying colours.
Almost all of the six cases that were recorded after the lockdown was called were already in isolation at the time of their positive test, a tribute to the work of contact tracers who had already also placed the contacts of those people in isolation in line with the “three-ring” principle of containment.
That’s the key reason the virus has not spread wider, and it would have been the case irrespective of the lockdown. Because the UK strain does not move at “light speed”. It is more infectious, in that an infected person has a higher chance of spreading the virus to more of their close contacts. But there’s no evidence that the incubation period of the UK strain is shorter. From this outbreak, it is clear that the time between people contracting the virus and becoming infectious was no shorter than usual, despite the early claims from Andrews.
Even if the incubation of the UK strain were a day shorter on average as was originally suggested, contact tracing can keep up by bringing secondary contacts into quarantine at the same time as the primary ones.
And that is exactly what occurred here.
A key question that now requires a dispassionate analysis is why Victorian authorities panicked. Up until a couple of days ago, Professor Sutton was still claiming the UK strain was up between 40 and 70 per cent more infectious. That upper limit is not in line with the latest scientific research.
On February 7, US researchers studying the spread of the UK variant, in an article published on the preprint server medRxiv, concluded it was between 35 and 45 per cent more transmissible. That was roughly in line with a report by UK executive agency Public Health England that found infected people passed the UK strain on to 14.7 per cent of their close contacts, compared to 11 per cent with the original strain.
It is understandable that the Andrews government has been scarred from the experience of the deadly second wave getting out of its control, but a clear-eyed analysis is now needed of whether lockdown turned out to make any difference at all.
“Hindsight is always the clearest form of vision but I think perhaps it was an overreaction, and perhaps they did not have a clear understanding of the infectiousness of the new variants,” says Australian National University professor Shane Thomas from the Research School of Population Health. “I think they (the Victorian government) should have confidence in their contact-tracing system.”
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