Wednesday, June 24, 2020

The Age - Contact tracing concerns raised by doctor with links to COVID-19 case

It's always interesting to read other people's opinions and to get inside information based on the experience of others. In the following article a doctor raises concerns about contact tracing in Victoria.


The situation is the doctor's wife carpools where driving is shared across two families. The doctor's wife drive's their son and two children from the other family. The father in the other family was tested positive for coronavirus.

So we have this situation
Father in first family tested positive for coronavirus
Wife and two children of the infected person are yet to be tested to see if they're infected.
Friend drives their son and the infected person's two children to or from school.
The doctor who is the husband of the friend (his wife) who drives the three children, considers their family a close contact of the infected person.

The doctor calls the health department concerned about potential transmission to find the wife of the infected person and their two children are yet to be tested. The doctor and his family don't need to get tested or go into isolation. Until the infected person's wife and two children are tested and the results come back, the doctor and his family are free to go about their lives as normal.

Sometimes what our government does simply makes no sense. Instead of asking the close contacts of an infected family to self isolate for a short period of time until test results are back, these people who could potentially be infected are told they can go about their normal activities. On the other hand the government calls entire local government areas hotspots, fines people for the most mundane relatively risk free activities. None of this makes sense.

It really does show that at the end of the day it is up to each of us to do what we think is best for ourselves, or family and our community. Just because the government says you can go about your normal activities, if you don't think that is the best thing to do, then that's your call.

Further the doctor was having a dinner with two other families when they received the call about their infected friend. To the credit of the doctor and the two other families, they decided to all self isolate until they heard back about the test results for the infected person's family.

Time and time again we see the government doings things too late or too little. Then using broad ranging control measures that are far too excessive. The government operates at the society level and the tools they use are broad and not very precise. We see it all the time in their decisions and how they restrict us as a population, not just during this pandemic. But the government isn't everything. We ultimately can decide what to do or not do and if we feel isolation is the the appropriate path, then that is what we should do.

You will be put under pressure from family and friends to see them, but if you don't quite feel things are right, listen to your gut feeling. Your gut feeling will keep you safe, or at least safer.

I think all of us would have thought all the close contacts of the infected person should have self quarantined until they knew the results of the testing. I'm thankful this doctor shared his story as otherwise I wouldn't have known what is really happening in terms of people self quarantining.

Kelvin Eldridge

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