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IMPORTANT // Please look after your loved ones, yourself and be kind to others. If you are feeling that the world is too hard to handle there is always help - I implore you not to hesitate in contacting one of these wonderful organisations Lifeline and Beyond Blue ... and I'm sure reaching out to our PRE community we will find a way to help. T.
Coronavirus
- Thread starter Tigers of Old
- Start date
Here's another explanation to add to the list.
Victoria’s systemic problems behind second wave (paywalled)
Yoni Bashan
The Australian
July 8, 2020
A shortage of public health professionals in the Victorian bureaucracy is being blamed for the second wave of COVID-19 cases sweeping Melbourne, with a lack of contact tracers and an inability to train them at scale leaving the state more vulnerable than if the transmissions had occurred in NSW.
As the number of active infections in the state from an unknown source reached 456 on Wednesday, those central to the national pandemic response said there was a “systemic” problem within Victoria’s Department of Health and Human Services.
“The question is why has it happened in Melbourne and not Sydney? There is an underlying issue with the capability of the Victorian health system — it is not up to it,” one national COVID source said.
Another official said the number of Victorian public health professionals had already been “depleted” before the coronavirus outbreak, leaving the state less able to quickly train additional staff compared with the NSW Public Health Network.
“If you don’t have the core workforce of a size proportionate to your jurisdiction to train those people, that’s where it can come a little bit unstuck,” the official said. “There is a difference between the numbers of core public health people in Victoria compared to NSW.”
Victoria Police and the Australian Defence Force closed metropolitan Melbourne at midnight on Wednesday — and the Mitcham Shire — from the rest of the state as Premier Daniel Andrews struggles to bring an accelerating outbreak under control. Victoria recorded 134 new COVID-19 cases on Wednesday, with only 11 connected to other known infections.
Mr Andrews has acknowledged the strain in tracking the virus was critical to imposing a second stay at home order in Melbourne to control the spread. “You get to a point … where you just can’t find enough people to manage a group that’s doubling and doubling again,” he said.
“That’s not just the positive cases, but all their friends, all their family, everybody they’ve spent time with. It gets to a point where you can’t have confidence that you’re actually finding everybody … and pulling it up,” he said. “We can kid ourselves that we can do a thousand cases a day. We can’t do a thousand cases a day.’’
The Victoria-NSW border was sealed on Wednesday morning, with NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian describing the likelihood of the contagion spreading north as “extremely high”.
The Berejiklian government is on Thursday expected to tighten restrictions in anticipation of further infections and after almost 50 passengers were allowed to disembark a Jetstar flight from Melbourne on Tuesday night without being screened for the virus.
Three passengers including one who refused to be screened have been referred to NSW Police.
Separately, a teenager holidaying on the NSW south coast was diagnosed with COVID-19 on Wednesday after a testing error by Victorian authorities. As Victoria grapples with the crisis, other states have sent staff to assist with contact tracing, including 70 “disease detectives” from NSW.
Melbourne University epidemiologist Tony Blakely described Victoria’s predicament as a combination of bad luck and poor management.
“The public health workforce started from a lower base in Victoria than in NSW,” he said.
“You have fewer people to take the calls coming in, to organise contact tracing, to oversee — and I’m speculating — the set up of quarantine. That can happen when your workforce is spread thin and you don’t have established expertise.”
The comments were echoed by Lindsay Grayson, an infectious diseases expert at Austin Health, has also criticised the Victorian Treasury for seeing DHHS as “nothing but a burden”.
“Like a choke hold that only gets released when there is barely a breath left – just enough to funding is provided to survive but never to thrive,” Professor Grayson wrote in The Age on Wednesday. “The Victorian Health Department is one of the worst-funded and dysfunctionally organised in the nation.”
A spokeswoman for NSW Health Minister Brad Hazzard said public health officials sent to Victoria to assist with contact tracing had interviewed more than 200 COVID-19 positive patients over the past five days.
A further 800 close contacts of those cases will be interviewed by the end of the week.
Victorian public health officials were tracing 5000 contacts earlier this week, a figure which was already nearing capacity before the most recent cases were detected.
For every active case, the known contacts increase in by between seven and nine.
There is no published data on the public health workforce numbers across the states, but one of the two officials who spoke to The Australian described the Victorian experience as one that would be “subject to strain in a pandemic”.
While health experts acknowledged that poor luck had played some role in the Victorian experience, they were quick to point out the state was less prepared to deal with this misfortune.
While NSW had been rocked by the Ruby Princess debacle, the inherent strength of the health department had meant the initial mistake was not compounded.
Another key contributor identified was the mismanagement of hotel quarantine arrangements, which has sparked a judicial inquiry into potential protocol breakdowns caused by hotel operators, private contractors and government agencies. Security guards monitoring were responsible for a number of localised outbreaks.
Large family gatherings were also believed to have been responsible for outbreaks, which, when combined with those caused by the security operators, have led to large pockets of transmission.
But epidemiologists warn that a fast and comprehensive contact tracing regimen is the only chance to effectively contain the virus.
“Unfortunately, because we don’t have a widespread available treatment including a vaccine, the only path forward is physical distancing and case detection,” Australian National University infectious diseases physician Sanjaya Senanayake said.
“It’s still important that 100 per cent of contacts are found in a short period of time, otherwise undetected contacts will have contracted the infection and you’ll never stop the outbreak,” Dr Senanayake told The Australian.
Curtin University infectious disease epidemiologist Archie Clements said Mr Andrew’s concerns over the state’s contact tracing capacity were justified. “I‘d be concerned if our outbreak numbers got ahead of contact tracing capacity, because that’s the point when you lose control.
“Until now we’ve been in control. In fact, the ability to do good contact tracing and to effectively isolate cases has been the key to Australia’s success in containing the virus in comparison to other countries. But if that capacity is exceeded and we do lose control, you just can’t get back on top of things.’’
Professor Clements warned that while geographical lockdowns were important in containment, without comprehensive contact tracing, “you are left with not knowing where the virus actually is”. “We don’t want to lose our privileged position where we basically know where all our cases are,” he said.
Both Dr Senanayake and Professor Clements said Mr Andrews needed to throw more resources at tracing the infections. “Basic contact tracing doesn’t require a high degree of skill, so long as there are good people supervising and co-ordinating,” Dr Senanayake said.
Victoria’s systemic problems behind second wave (paywalled)
Yoni Bashan
The Australian
July 8, 2020
A shortage of public health professionals in the Victorian bureaucracy is being blamed for the second wave of COVID-19 cases sweeping Melbourne, with a lack of contact tracers and an inability to train them at scale leaving the state more vulnerable than if the transmissions had occurred in NSW.
As the number of active infections in the state from an unknown source reached 456 on Wednesday, those central to the national pandemic response said there was a “systemic” problem within Victoria’s Department of Health and Human Services.
“The question is why has it happened in Melbourne and not Sydney? There is an underlying issue with the capability of the Victorian health system — it is not up to it,” one national COVID source said.
Another official said the number of Victorian public health professionals had already been “depleted” before the coronavirus outbreak, leaving the state less able to quickly train additional staff compared with the NSW Public Health Network.
“If you don’t have the core workforce of a size proportionate to your jurisdiction to train those people, that’s where it can come a little bit unstuck,” the official said. “There is a difference between the numbers of core public health people in Victoria compared to NSW.”
Victoria Police and the Australian Defence Force closed metropolitan Melbourne at midnight on Wednesday — and the Mitcham Shire — from the rest of the state as Premier Daniel Andrews struggles to bring an accelerating outbreak under control. Victoria recorded 134 new COVID-19 cases on Wednesday, with only 11 connected to other known infections.
Mr Andrews has acknowledged the strain in tracking the virus was critical to imposing a second stay at home order in Melbourne to control the spread. “You get to a point … where you just can’t find enough people to manage a group that’s doubling and doubling again,” he said.
“That’s not just the positive cases, but all their friends, all their family, everybody they’ve spent time with. It gets to a point where you can’t have confidence that you’re actually finding everybody … and pulling it up,” he said. “We can kid ourselves that we can do a thousand cases a day. We can’t do a thousand cases a day.’’
The Victoria-NSW border was sealed on Wednesday morning, with NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian describing the likelihood of the contagion spreading north as “extremely high”.
The Berejiklian government is on Thursday expected to tighten restrictions in anticipation of further infections and after almost 50 passengers were allowed to disembark a Jetstar flight from Melbourne on Tuesday night without being screened for the virus.
Three passengers including one who refused to be screened have been referred to NSW Police.
Separately, a teenager holidaying on the NSW south coast was diagnosed with COVID-19 on Wednesday after a testing error by Victorian authorities. As Victoria grapples with the crisis, other states have sent staff to assist with contact tracing, including 70 “disease detectives” from NSW.
Melbourne University epidemiologist Tony Blakely described Victoria’s predicament as a combination of bad luck and poor management.
“The public health workforce started from a lower base in Victoria than in NSW,” he said.
“You have fewer people to take the calls coming in, to organise contact tracing, to oversee — and I’m speculating — the set up of quarantine. That can happen when your workforce is spread thin and you don’t have established expertise.”
The comments were echoed by Lindsay Grayson, an infectious diseases expert at Austin Health, has also criticised the Victorian Treasury for seeing DHHS as “nothing but a burden”.
“Like a choke hold that only gets released when there is barely a breath left – just enough to funding is provided to survive but never to thrive,” Professor Grayson wrote in The Age on Wednesday. “The Victorian Health Department is one of the worst-funded and dysfunctionally organised in the nation.”
A spokeswoman for NSW Health Minister Brad Hazzard said public health officials sent to Victoria to assist with contact tracing had interviewed more than 200 COVID-19 positive patients over the past five days.
A further 800 close contacts of those cases will be interviewed by the end of the week.
Victorian public health officials were tracing 5000 contacts earlier this week, a figure which was already nearing capacity before the most recent cases were detected.
For every active case, the known contacts increase in by between seven and nine.
There is no published data on the public health workforce numbers across the states, but one of the two officials who spoke to The Australian described the Victorian experience as one that would be “subject to strain in a pandemic”.
While health experts acknowledged that poor luck had played some role in the Victorian experience, they were quick to point out the state was less prepared to deal with this misfortune.
While NSW had been rocked by the Ruby Princess debacle, the inherent strength of the health department had meant the initial mistake was not compounded.
Another key contributor identified was the mismanagement of hotel quarantine arrangements, which has sparked a judicial inquiry into potential protocol breakdowns caused by hotel operators, private contractors and government agencies. Security guards monitoring were responsible for a number of localised outbreaks.
Large family gatherings were also believed to have been responsible for outbreaks, which, when combined with those caused by the security operators, have led to large pockets of transmission.
But epidemiologists warn that a fast and comprehensive contact tracing regimen is the only chance to effectively contain the virus.
“Unfortunately, because we don’t have a widespread available treatment including a vaccine, the only path forward is physical distancing and case detection,” Australian National University infectious diseases physician Sanjaya Senanayake said.
“It’s still important that 100 per cent of contacts are found in a short period of time, otherwise undetected contacts will have contracted the infection and you’ll never stop the outbreak,” Dr Senanayake told The Australian.
Curtin University infectious disease epidemiologist Archie Clements said Mr Andrew’s concerns over the state’s contact tracing capacity were justified. “I‘d be concerned if our outbreak numbers got ahead of contact tracing capacity, because that’s the point when you lose control.
“Until now we’ve been in control. In fact, the ability to do good contact tracing and to effectively isolate cases has been the key to Australia’s success in containing the virus in comparison to other countries. But if that capacity is exceeded and we do lose control, you just can’t get back on top of things.’’
Professor Clements warned that while geographical lockdowns were important in containment, without comprehensive contact tracing, “you are left with not knowing where the virus actually is”. “We don’t want to lose our privileged position where we basically know where all our cases are,” he said.
Both Dr Senanayake and Professor Clements said Mr Andrews needed to throw more resources at tracing the infections. “Basic contact tracing doesn’t require a high degree of skill, so long as there are good people supervising and co-ordinating,” Dr Senanayake said.
Personally I chose to ignore it because it's been discussed to death and the only idea suggested was 'the data is lying'.
Are you pushing to start the discussion again?
Just an observation, no need to get tetchy. Some of you seem to get more offended by criticism of the protest than I was by the protest itself.
My only issue with it was singling out that behaviour over other similar behaviours. And I'm not being tetchy. It's that you have asked a number of times for it to not be discussed but you keep needling.
Can we drop it?
It was remarked upon that I like General's post, and I replied. Yeah we can drop it.
Apparently Jayco's are chock a block on the Freeways in their race to beat curfew and willingly infect those in regional and holiday destinations.
Nah, I reckon they know exactly how selfish they are.
The Police should be going around the houses on both peninsulas and other holiday areas, running number plates for the address, and dragging those who have gone to their holiday houses back to Melbourne. We were thinking of going to our holiday house, but that was ruled out once the infection rates rose. You have to be realistic, it was rising in Melbourne, not in our area, but still too irresponsible to leave in that situation.
That article in the Aus is about a day behind the same story in The Age, it seems the disorganisation of the Health Dept under Kennett, which no-one since has fixed from either major party, means it is a lot less functional than in other states. Time to fix it now the problem is obvious.
Yeah, I also noticed the further reference to the BLM demo, just sick of having to point out the lack of any evidence of this claim, couldn't be bothered. I do like the way that 1 maybe correlation and 6 non-correlations seems to be enough evidence to draw a conclusion when it suits, but on climate science decades of evidence is insufficient. Mind you, I'm not allowed to make such comparisons, apparently it is somehow unfair to point this out.
DS
There were no actual numbers provided in the article, just an allegation that Victorian health is understaffed. I'm not sure it's a valid criticism; these are exceptional circumstances. How many staff can you afford to have sitting around on the off chance there's a pandemic?
Whatever the numbers are, you can bet there'd be fewer of them under a Liberal government.
The supposed understaffing and underfunding of the DHHS in Victoria would be disputed by some, including me. If there was an article about how the DHHS is adequately funded and staffed but that they would be far more effective if they spent more on the right resources and on providing real assistance to our public health sector rather than mindless bureaucracy, then I would agree with it.
Whilst there were things that were good about the public health reforms of the Kennett era part of the problem we now have is that the system is way more decentralised than other states making coordination from a centre far more difficult.
Government would be best served not by putting more money into the central bureaucracy but by revamping the system into a model closer to NSW and looking at the value of some of the things they do and the massive duplication of work. They don’t need more money, what they need is a complete overhaul of what they do, how they are run and how public health is organised in the state
Many students are going back into the classroom next week in Victoria but the question has to be asked is this safe policy right now? I want my son back at school, every parent does but teens aren’t exactly reliable when it comes to social distancing. I remain unconvinced it’s the wisest policy in a pandemic..
I can believe this. From personal experience DHHS is completely incompetent .
I wasn't aware of the mismatch in public health services between Victoria and NSW. That is damning on successive Victorian Governments and hopefully a positive that comes out of this cluster *smile* is that the public health services receive the future funds that they need to provide proper service to the fastest growing population in Australia.
Come on David. The Kennett Government ended in 1999. Whatever his failings, and there were numerous, that is two decades past. The subsequent 21 years have seen 17 of those under Labor Governments. Bracks, Brumby and Andrews have had more than enough opportunity to fix it. It is an indictment on them that they haven't.
I'll say it again, at no point were students social distancing in classrooms/schools.
They are being asked to sanitise their hands. That's it. They have been sitting shoulder to shoulder, in line with the general overcrowding of classrooms that's happened more and more recently.
It's not unusual to have 27 students and a teacher in a room the size of a living room. This has been the case over the last month too.
It may be, with only seniors going back next week, that it's possible to spread them out more. It's not likely to be effective though.
I personally don't understand why seniors are going back. Senior students are the only ones who have so far been involved (driven?) a cluster of cases. They're the most at risk out of all kids. And the highest risk to public health.
They're also the most successful remote learners out of the group, having some general sense of self motivation, and the fact that remote learning lends itself more naturally to the way senior classes run.
I would have rathered the year 7's be back at school. They're the ones who appear to be lower risk, the ones who are struggling the most, and the ones whose levels of socio-economic advantage seem to affect the most (not evidence based, just personal experience).
I'm not worried about my year 12's, or year 10s, but I have a genuine concern for how the lockdowns this year will affect the juniors long term.
My son's in Year 12 and he sees it as being his most important year of school. The culmination of 13 years of work. He wants to receive his ATAR just like everyone else and I agree. All the restrictions are arbitrary in reality. Some things are just deemed by society/the government to be more vital than others. I don't think that there's much debate on what the most important year of school is, so I reckon the government has got this call right at least.
If that's the case and they are going back to the same conditions in a couple of weeks, then don't call this thing a total lockdown for 6 weeks. Good luck Victoria, you're going to need it.
- Mar 6, 2004
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ANy hope of going up to see some footy is gone
Victorians will be turned away if they try and enter Queensland from lunchtime tomorrow.
They will not be allowed to quarantine in the sunshine state either, with Anastasia Palaszczuk announcing stricter measures on Thursday morning.
“Given the developing situation in Victoria, Queensland is hardening its border,” the Queensland Premier said.
“From noon, July 10, visitors from Victoria will no longer gain access or be able to quarantine in Queensland.
“They will be turned around.”
Victorians will be turned away if they try and enter Queensland from lunchtime tomorrow.
They will not be allowed to quarantine in the sunshine state either, with Anastasia Palaszczuk announcing stricter measures on Thursday morning.
“Given the developing situation in Victoria, Queensland is hardening its border,” the Queensland Premier said.
“From noon, July 10, visitors from Victoria will no longer gain access or be able to quarantine in Queensland.
“They will be turned around.”
