When Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews fronted the media last month announcing that the state would enter a five day hard lockdown over less than 20 active COVID-19 cases, he explicitly admitted that he did not have confidence in Victoria’s contact tracing system:
“This [lockdown] comes about because you have got to assume that there are even a handful of cases that you don’t know about. And that if you are open, they won’t finish up with one or two close contacts, they will end up with hundreds of close contacts and they, in turn, hundreds of secondary contacts. It [lockdown] is effective in pulling these things up”.
At the time I noted that Victoria’s decision was curious given NSW had managed two substantially bigger outbreaks without resorting to city or statewide lockdowns, as illustrated clearly in the next chart:
