For example there has been relatively small numbers of infections in Victoria's regional areas and yet the entire state has been locked down. Some areas have had little or no infections. It would make far more sense for regional Victoria to continue with their lives and the lockdown only be applied to the wider metropolitan Melbourne. I even suspect some cases associated with regional areas may have been travellers who never returned to the regional area whilst being infected since infections are recorded based on a person's normal residential address.
So when I see the recent outbreak I can't help feel the government isn't taking the best approach. They should in my opinion isolate the infected person and not let them isolate at home to infect the rest of their family and potentially extended family. Those who are in contact should then be isolated for 14 days. Testing of close contacts should be performed after 5 days as the median time for infected people to show symptoms is around 5 days. If any of these people are infected they should be isolated away from other people. The idea that infected people go back and infect their family to me is crazy and leads to outbreaks amongst family members and that is the problem Victoria is currently facing.
Now whilst I think the Victorian government isn't doing what is required, the following article shows that neither are Victorians doing what is required. Around 50% of people who are being tested for coronavirus at a shopping centre (Chadstone) either came from the centre or went into the centre before or after testing. This is completely against the advice of the health department and shows that as a group, half of us are happy to do the wrong thing and that is a truly sad indictment of us as a community. Had the percentage been much lower as we'd all expect I'd continue to be annoyed at the government's sledgehammer approach. However, the government knows how we behave as a group and I'm sure this would factor into their decisions. The government is only doing what it needs to do because we as a community aren't prepared to do what we should do. Thus the government takes excessive means when much simpler and more basic approaches could be used.
Another example is the recent large scale protests which shows people will not do what is needed at this time for their local community. Whilst personally I felt the probability of any or many infections arising out of the protests was low to none, due to the low rate of community transmission from unknown origins, it does show how people behave even when informed.
In terms of people entering or leaving the shopping centre before or after being tested, this is more about how we as a group behave. We don't do the right thing. In terms of infections, again the probability is low as with the very large number of tests performed (more than 660,000) there has been a very low number of positive results.
Ask yourself have you done at all times what is required, even as a very good citizen. Do you know people who at Easter got together when they shouldn't have. You'll then start to understand why the Victoria government has to do what it does. It's not what it should do, but it's what our behaviour we as a community do, that makes it so.
To me that is truly sad.
Kelvin Eldridge
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