Once is an accident, twice a coincidence: but if Victoria gets hit with yet another wave of the Wuhan virus, then that’s just sheer, staggering incompetence.
Victoria is far and away Australia’s worst-performing state in the COVID pandemic: more than twice the number of infections and a shocking nine times as many deaths as all the other seven states and territories combined. That horrific failure is almost entirely due to the Andrews government.
It was the Andrews government which set up to fail the disastrous hotel quarantine scheme that was the origin of some 90% of its infections and deaths. Victoria also reacted with the known strategy of failure: community-wide lockdowns (although, to be fair, most Western governments have stupidly followed much the same useless policy).
Yet Premier Daniel Andrews boasts that Victoria has “higher standards” of pandemic management than any other state.
That boast looks likely to be put to the test. Again.
Victoria has reimposed mask mandates – $200 on-the-spot fines for non-compliance – and other restrictions after recording a handful of new cases. Perhaps this is just a typical overreaction from the authoritarians who’ve become addicted to locking whole populations down. Others are worried that it’s a grim case of déjà vu.
This is a grave test for a state government that failed on so many levels during the second wave.
At the risk of catastrophising, few with deep knowledge of what went wrong will have much faith that a third wave can be averted.
There have been a few similar small outbreaks in NSW, too, but the government there seems to have mostly got its act in order – especially by avoiding city or state-wide lockdowns.
Victoria’s singular failure following its second wave, aside from persisting with a woefully-managed hotel quarantine regime, is in the area of contact tracing.
There are multiple concerning aspects of these four northern suburbs cases. First, we don’t know whether the virus has been silently spreading through Melbourne’s north for many days.
Second, there are unique geographical and sociological reasons to be concerned about the spread. This is not the relatively tightly contained northern beaches in Sydney. It is an open expanse of outer suburbia where work is insecure and the car is a preferred mode of transport.
This means that if the virus has spread, it can go a long way, very quickly, as people scoot around the suburbs to work in factories, aged-care homes and meatworks. Further, it shares the same multicultural characteristics that made it difficult for the health sector to communicate messages in 2020.
The broader picture is that after months of no community transmission, the people of Melbourne have become increasingly slack when dealing with the virus’s implications.
Add to this the rather hopeless Victorian QR system, which is still a work in progress, and it’s hard to feel anything other than a deep sense of dread about how this will all end up[…]
The best that can be hoped for is that the government rises, phoenix-like, above its previous incompetence before another raging viral bushfire takes hold.
The Australian
Don’t hold your breath. What’s far more, drearily, certain is that Victorians will continue to burble that they “Stand With Dan” as their socialist premier fails spectacularly yet again.
This ominous state of affairs might also have gloomy implications across the Tasman: it’s not for nothing that I’ve previously called NZ PM Jacinda Ardern “Dan’s twin in failure”. Whatever the fawning media might say.
New Zealand has seen a constant dribble of new COVID infections, mostly linked to hotel quarantine. But New Zealand has managed to avoid another wave – for the same reasons that it was barely touched in the first. It wasn’t Ardern who “saved” New Zealand, it was geography and demographics. An isolated island at the far end of the world, with a tiny population and no mass transit to speak of, New Zealand was never going to be hit as hard by the pandemic as Australia, let alone the United States.
New Zealand’s pandemic performance has been almost entirely good luck, not good management.
Kiwis better hope their luck holds out, because it looks grimly likely that Victoria’s will run out. Again.
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