COVID-19 gold standard again

As expected the weekly "Gold Standard" lottery in NSW has won a prize.

Tolerating non-zero "mystery cases" to avoid lockdowns was welcomed by the Federal government and its health advisors as "textbook" performance in Victoria to avoid lockdown.

With the media clamouring against lockdown the Victorian government delayed and attempted a limited local lockdown instead.

Naturally that failed. You cannot confine a pandemic to parts of a major city while people are still allowed to go to work.

Odd that anyone ever thought it possible. New Zealand's success was because it went immediately into lockdown at the first case of community transmission and stayed there until the last.

But people do only learn from experience.

South Australia did learn from Victoria's experience and locked down promptly.

The Federal and media campaign against Victoria's lockdown was so intensive that it successfully avoided any attention being paid to the major blunder that led to it being so prolonged. That was not the (hardly unusual) blundering with Hotel Quarantine but the failure to act promptly and decisively as soon as "mystery cases" developed.

So NSW never did learn the lesson and is now repeating Victoria's mistakes.

They got away without lockdowns despite having a small amount of community transmission and this weekly "risk management" lottery was held up as a shining example that contact tracing could make lockdown unnecessary.

Now that NSW has 30 cases in one day it is reluctantly and slowly moving towards a Greater Sydney lockdown.

But first it has to exhaust every other alternative.