Victoria's lock down postcodes versus Victoria's priority suburbs for coronavirus.

Yesterday the Victorian government released a list of postcodes that will go into lock down from midnight tonight (Wednesday July 1, 2020). To me this is a bit perplexing. The government went from LGA (local government areas), to suburbs (the 12 priority suburbs) and then flipped back to the broader area of postcodes. There's things here that don't really make sense.

The move from LGA to suburb makes sense. Some LGAs cover huge areas, one LGA hotspot for example is 52 kilometres at the longest points. In effect half way from Melbourne to Ballarat. Far to long to be useful.

Getting the information down to suburb is sensible. Yes, there's still some suburbs that are big, but suburbs are well defined. The suburbs in their list of priority suburbs were the following:

Keilor Downs

Broadmeadows

Maidstone

Albanvale

Sunshine West

Hallam

Brunswick West

Fawkner

Reservoir

Pakenham

Keilor Downs 

Broadmeadows

Now we've gone to 10 postcodes. The postcodes and suburbs within those postcodes are:

3012 - Brooklyn, Kingsville, Maidstone, Tottenham, West Footscray

3021 - Albanvale, Kealba, Kings Park, St Albans

3032 - Ascot Vale, Highpoint City, Maribyrnong, Travancore

3038 - Keilor Downs, Keilor Lodge, Taylors Lakes, Watergardens

3042 - Airport West, Keilor Park, Niddrie, Niddrie North

3046 - Glenroy, Hadfield, Oak Park

3047 - Broadmeadows, Dallas , Jacana

3055 - Brunswick South, Brunswick West, Moonee Vale, Moreland West

3060 - Fawkner

3064 - Craigieburn, Donnybrook, Mickleham, Roxburgh Park, Kalkallo

The bolded suburbs in the first list are not in the postcode list. The bolded suburbs in the second list are the only suburbs mentioned in the first list.

You can see the postcodes cover many more suburbs and many of them were not mentioned as priority suburbs. Even more concerning is that one third of the priority suburbs are not even in the list of postcodes. I could see how perhaps one priority suburb can flip, but four! That's pretty hard to believe.

I can't help feeling that perhaps the government's reports are produced at postcode level and not suburb level. As a result postcodes are being used, whereas suburbs could be used. Perhaps I'm wrong. But to me there's a long distance between Mickleham and Donnybrook.

Perhaps it's just me. If the government released more data in a timely manner at the suburb level both of for the households and the locations of infections, we'd have better information we could make decisions on. New South Wales does have data available for the person's location to postcode level.

My main concern is the state government has somehow included four suburbs and now they're not included and there's no information as to why. The second concern is the government is going to lock down these suburbs, but allow people to go to work and school. If you look back through the recent cases many have been linked to work and school locations. If I read this situation correctly, the government is simply making the area sufficiently large and then squeezing it so as to slow down the spread of the virus. Yes it's possibly too large an area, and that will inconvenience many people, but larger is easier for the government.

Kelvin Eldridge

www.Mapz.com.au/coronavirusvictoria/

Update: 04/07/2020

The following article shows how postcodes are determined as to whether or not they will be locked down.

https://www.news.com.au/lifestyle/health/health-problems/state-government-to-determine-more-postcode-lockdowns-across-melbourne-over-weekend/news-story/fb03535755945cbd8ce1b1209199b832