The risk of COVID escaping from hotel quarantine or a health-care setting will never be zero. But in NSW and Queensland, was everything possible done to minimise the risk?
- Chair in Epidemiology, Deakin University
We need to rigorously analyse data from recent lockdowns, so we can respond better to future outbreaks.
Investigations are continuing into the case of a returned traveller in NSW who tested positive to COVID two days after leaving hotel quarantine. Could they have had an abnormally long incubation period?
Greater Brisbane will spend the next three days in lockdown, although this time around it’s to ensure no further spread from a single known case, rather than to suppress an existing outbreak.
States and territories have reacted to the Sydney COVID outbreak with varying degrees of travel restrictions. But border closures are a blunt tool, given almost all cases are linked to known hotspots.
Just because you can go to a Sydney New Year’s party, it doesn’t mean you should.
The cluster in Sydney’s northern beaches is likely linked to a US strain of the virus. But no one knows how it got there.
In my view the short, sharp lockdown is warranted. It will give authorities time to discover the extent of exposure from this cluster.
Melbourne could be out of lockdown within a week, if COVID-19 case numbers continue their current trend. But blanket rules such as the new 25km travel radius risk unnecessarily burdening the public.
Some hard lessons have been learned along the way but the contact tracing system in Victoria is now very comprehensive and increasingly robust.
The focus, for some time, has been on new daily case numbers. But what if we are looking at the wrong figure? We should focus on the average number of cases “under investigation” over the last 14 days.
Ahead of the release of Victoria’s roadmap out of lockdown, we asked four experts to explain what they see as the most important aspects of the state’s path out of stage 4.
Australian Bureau of Statistics figures suggest there have been more than 800 ‘excess deaths’ in Australia in January-March 2020, relative to the average, but only 103 confirmed COVID-19 deaths so far.
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