The article below published in The Australian yesterday highlights the effectiveness of NSW contact tracing versus the poor outcomes from Victorian contact tracing. This is what I mean when I say the Vic Health department has let Victoria down badly. The facts speak for themselves.
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a Coronavirus: How Victoria’s contact tracers struggled while NSW’s triumphed
Every morning at 11 sharp, NSW Health sends out its daily coronavirus press release, detailing each new case, including the cluster to which it’s been linked, and any locations associated with it.
South of the Murray, Victoria’s Department of Health and Human Services is still doing things differently, more than a month after the peak of a second wave of infections which has killed 718 people, compared with three deaths in NSW over the same period.
Premier Daniel Andrews proclaimed last week that a contingent from Victoria including DHHS and Australian Defence Force personnel and the nation’s Chief Scientist Alan Finkel was only travelling to Sydney to “double and triple check” whether the southern state’s contact tracing protocol was up to scratch.
But any close examination of each state’s case data in the early days of their second waves of coronavirus cases indicates the stark difference in their cumulative case numbers (4185 compared with 19,943) is no accident.
This is despite NSW’s second wave comprising six separate “index” cases of community transmission — all genomically linked to Victoria — compared with at least 99 per cent of Victoria’s second wave being genomically linked to breaches at two quarantine hotels.
As independent data analyst and covidlive.com.au founder Anthony Macali has demonstrated clearly with two simple graphs showing the first fortnights in which Victoria and NSW recorded more than 10 locally acquired cases per day, after previously having days of zero, Victoria’s days of 700+ new cases followed weeks of contact tracers failing to rapidly investigate cases. Its testing rate in the early days was also less than half that of NSW at the same point in the cycle.
Victoria went from no new cases on June 9 to 17 on June 17 — its first day of more than 10 locally acquired cases. In the three days from June 17, the average number of tests conducted was 5991. By June 25, there were 26 cases under investigation. This soared to a peak of 3969 on August 5.
NSW recorded its first day of more than 10 locally acquired cases on July 13, with an average testing rate over the next three days of 14,170 and an “under investigation” figure that never rose above four in the next fortnight and was more often zero.
Crucially, a comparison between Victoria’s current practices and those in NSW indicates that while the numbers have fallen dramatically from 7880 active cases on August 11 to 991 on Wednesday, DHHS still lags behind in rapidly establishing and communicating case data — a practice which becomes ever more important amid the Victorian roadmap, which leaves Melburnians under stay-at-home and curfew restrictions until there have been no unknown source cases for a fortnight.
The Victorian department’s daily press release can arrive at any point between 1.30pm and almost 5pm, and contains no breakdown of the clusters to which the day’s cases have been linked, with more than a dozen of each day’s cases still “under investigation”.
A few weeks ago this number was in the hundreds. On Wednesday, 13 of 42 new cases were “under investigation” almost 24 hours after the department had been notified of their existence.
Victorian Minister for Health Jenny Mikakos.
Asked why Victoria could not follow the example of its interstate counterpart and offer more detail regarding each day’s cases, Health Minister Jenny Mikakos said: “I’m absolutely committed to making sure we provide as much information as possible to the community. We have been putting more and more data, including details of localised outbreaks, on the DHHS website and if there’s more information we can put in the Chief Health Officer’s media release.’’
The Australian also asked why there was a handful of previously reported cases each day that got reclassified due to duplication. On Wednesday this was 10, meaning almost a quarter of Tuesday’s 42 new cases had in fact been duplicates.
The minister said lab results coming through overnight and a process of “sifting through the data” may explain duplication.
Rachel Baxendale writes on state and federal politics from The Australian's Melbourne and Victorian press gallery bureaux.
