If you could sell fear, the Victorian government wouldn’t have a budget deficit problem.
Between September 23 and 30 there was an average of 1.4 new cases per day reported outside of aged care and healthcare in Victoria. (There was an average of 8.4 cases per day in contained aged care settings across this same period.)
The all-important number of “mystery” cases has also been dropping dramatically. Since September 25, there have been only four confirmed cases of community transmission. This would be the envy of much of the world.
And yet Daniel Andrews continues to hold daily glum press conferences warning of the COVID menace, and the chief medical officer warns of potential “super-spreader” events.
In this state of more than six million residents, there’s around one new case in the general community per day, but Victorian residents remain stuck in one of the world’s harshest lockdowns, barred from travelling more than 5km and visiting family until at least November.
What’s going on?
Even those (like your writer) who opposed the strict lockdown don’t necessarily support a full wind-back of restrictions tomorrow. There’s no point wasting two months of economic destruction only to go right back to where we started. But the current restrictions seem to bear no relation to the current data.
The key to opening quickly and safely is reducing the risk of super-spreader events (like large indoor gatherings or mass sporting events). These can easily be avoided, while allowing small businesses like restaurants and retail shops to start operating again.
There’s also no reason for activities like tennis or golf to remain banned. Similarly, the two-hour daily exercise limit remains counter-intuitive given experts suggest the risk of infection is 19 times more likely indoors. There is virtually zero risk in these inherently isolated activities.
Regional Victoria has done even better than Melbourne, with only three known active cases. Despite suppressing the virus, regional Victorians are limited to meeting in groups of 10 outdoors and permitted to visit only one other household. Masks also remain compulsory.
This is a significant infraction of civil rights with no apparent health justification. Regional Victoria still has a maximum of 20 people at a funeral. Want to get married? Ten people maximum, even outdoors.
Andrews’ paranoia — his fear that a third wave will cost him his job — appears to be the driver of Victoria’s ham-fisted approach to reopening.
The real villain, however, isn’t necessarily Andrews, but the so-called free enterprise and business-loving Scott Morrison (this past weekend dubbed “Australia’s most powerful person” by The Australian Financial Review).
While Morrison and Treasurer Josh Frydenberg repeatedly scold Andrews’ handling of quarantine and lockdown, they happily cower behind Andrews’ harsh lockdown and the other premiers’ overly cautious approaches to border openings.
If Morrison really wanted open borders within Australia, this could be achieved with the stroke of a pen: simply withhold JobKeeper (or any number of other federal payments) from any state that doesn’t comply. But Scotty from marketing is happy to let the premiers take the heat for his own weak approach to restarting the economy.
The rest of Australia safely opened in May with similar case numbers to what Victoria is currently reporting. Meanwhile a huge number of Victorians seek help for mental health issues and zombie businesses face imminent collapse.
Adam Schwab is a commentator, business director, and the co-founder of LuxuryEscapes.com.
How about travel website owners stick to writing about travel and infectious diseases specialists do the writing about the whether or not we should get out of lockdown? Just sayin’
I fully concur.
Perhaps Schwab fancies flogging a few travel packages to, say, Europe. If he ‘sold’ the clientele on the France/Belgium/Netherlands region, he’d be sending his clients to 3 nations that have just breezed past their all time ‘new case’ records, all after ‘opening up’ to varying degrees, for and at different times.
In the case of the Netherlands, yesterday’s New Record! bested the PB by circa 12%. When was that PB?
The day before.
Or, Schwab might prefer sending his clientele to the land of ‘BoJo the Recovered’.
Where they’ve just revealed, to quote;
“An outdated Excel spreadsheet has been blamed for a new coronavirus fiasco in England, where as many as 50,000 people who should have been self-isolating were not because a batch of positive cases were never passed on to contact tracers….”
Quite frankly if this guy keeps writing dribble in Crikey the chances of me renewing my subscription decreases on each article. I like alternative viewpoints but not outright unsubstantiated self-serving garbage. Adam, move to the US where they implement your ideas, and see first hand how well they are doing!
He’s probably cheering on the Great Strength of the USA’s Dear Leader for that little joy ride in a hermetically sealed vehicle. Putting the health of Secret Service agents and their families at risk? Pfft. Time to set EVERYONE free from masked tyranny!
I’ve already unsubscribed. This is my last voice. I’m not one for supporting a publisher that prints such conspiratorial rubbish. Adam doesn’t know shyte from clay but that doesn’t seem to slow him down. Who would want to stay at his travel lodge or anyone else’s for that matter that would flaut any healthy and safety rules just because they miss their late’s at the corner cafe.
I think this is the third time I have commented adversely on one of Adam Schwab’s articles. The content is just so facile and ignores the epidemiology and the science which are, invariably, part of the daily press conferences. I read a range of newspapers and journals so as to ensure that my opinions and understandings are challenged; however, I expect better from Crikey than the utterances of an ill-informed businessman who doesn’t seem to comprehend the realities of achieving a manageable level of the virus in this state.
This isn’t “the world”, it’s Australia. Neither WA, NSW, TAS, NT, QLD, SA or the ACT would be envious of VIC’s cases of community transmission. Moreover, none of those states will let Victorians in lest they risk throwing away their much more envious status of zero cases. Is Schwab willing to allow for Victoria to be the pariah state, ostracized from the rest of the country until a supposed vaccine comes along? Which could very well be two, three, four years for all we know.
Totally cherry picked data as well, the 3 days before the 25 all have multiple unknown cases
No the numbers don’t prove it.
And the author’s bio suggests two things. One, they’ve no expertise in statistics, health, medicine or public policy that might support the argument.
Two, they’ve a vested economic interest in a more ‘let it rip’ approach, which isn’t clearly stated in the article. Instead, it points weakly to civil liberties as a defence. And overlooks the fact that some key super-spreading events behind the Victorian second wave occurred in people’s homes.
There’re plenty of reasons and ways to criticise the Andrew’s government’s approach. This one is particularly weak.
And an adherence to such an economic argument as this perpetuates the ‘public health versus economy’ fallacy. As if the latter was a kind of ‘celestial clockwork’ divorced from the former.
I don’t expect to agree with every Crikey writer’s perspective. Quite the contrary — in fact it’s why I subscribe to Crikey. But this article’s shows a surprising lack of editorial rigour.
The article does suck, but I am unsure why you think infections indoors is a slam dunk against it. One of his main points is that non-contact outdoor activities are lower risk than being indoors.