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Contact tracing is important to dealing with covid, but isn’t a silver bullet. If you don’t believe me, check out what’s happening in South Korea. Their contact tracing really is gold standard, using electronic methods (our app doesn’t work). Yet they now have 1000 cases a day.
I always said it was dangerously simplistic for Morrison and much of media in turn to blame Victorian outbreak on 'bad contact tracing' while calling NSW gold standard. Covid spread is too complex to explain by one attack line. Complexity is explained here https://twitter.com/Vic_Rollison/status/1317624376129286144?s=20
The focus only on contact tracing was and still is a political narrative, when what the public needed was proper analysis of all the factors which contribute to spread of covid, and the reality of undetected cases. It did nothing to inform the public of risk of covid outbreaks.
You might recall I also said that Morrison's 'gold standard' tag for NSW was also unfair on the NSW government, particularly NSW Health who then are expected to be perfect in dealing with covid, and lock it down immediately. That's just not the reality of dealing with a pandemic.
I watched for months as many on here (you know who you are) slung criticism at Vic DHHS every day demanding to know where lists of locations were and telling them they were failing. They weren't failing - contact tracing is an inexact science dealing with human imperfection.
As we learned the hard way in SA, sometimes people lie to contact tracers. Sometimes they can't recall where they were. As we've seen in NSW, sometimes people don't isolate while waiting for test results. In Vic, we heard sometimes people didn't stay home after a positive result.
People are complex, so dealing with a pandemic is complex. Every single element of the Victorian outbreak was blamed on the leak from quarantine and bad contact tracing. I watched as this simplified narrative took hold, and became the rule of thumb to explain everything.
I think the biggest risk of a covid outbreak is people who have covid symptoms who don't get tested and don't isolate. If contact tracers don't know about a case, there is a chance that person won't infect anyone. But there is also a chance that case will be a super spreader.
I see pandemic like a bushfire. Sometimes a spark sets off a major blaze, sometimes it fizzles out. No one blames firefighters for not stopping a bushfire before it destroys homes. So why was everyone blaming Victorian contact tracers for not getting ahead of undetected spread?
So much of spread of a pandemic is about luck. The wrong case in the wrong location at the wrong time of infectiousness can set off a major outbreak. In SA, someone who caught covid in hotel quarantine was a super spreader at a large family function. 35 cases all from one case.
In NSW, it looks like there's been a super spreader event in an enclosed entertainment space. We know someone who had it was in a band, and singing mixed with dance floor is a major risk in spread. This is all down to luck. It's not the fault of anyone that this happened.
In Victoria, when Sutton said they'd had a super spreader event right at start of their second wave (I note he was always careful not to give too much detail about cases so they couldn't be targeted for outrage), this was ignored as all just more evidence that govt was to blame.
So I'll end by saying, I hope you're sympathetic to what NSW Health is dealing with and acknowledge they are all doing everything they can to stop this pandemic spreading. And, let's reflect on why Victoria didn't get this same support when going through same. Thanks Scott. End.
