Victoria's Chief Health Officer says the coronavirus threat in his state is "profoundly different" to New South Wales', despite the two states recording similar new case numbers in recent weeks.
Daniel Andrews' Government is facing an increasingly restless public and calls from the State Opposition and Federal Government to ease the state's tough lockdown to restrictions more like NSW's.
Yesterday, New South Wales recorded more coronavirus cases than Victoria for the second time in the past 10 days.
But New South Wales is operating under relative freedom while social restrictions are imposed across Victoria, and remain particularly tough in Melbourne.
"In New South Wales, they're managing to keep the doors of businesses open, people employed, yet they're also dealing with new cases every day," federal Treasurer Josh Frydenberg said.
Mr Andrews will announce the loosening of some rules on Sunday, but has warned many business restrictions will remain in place.
Coronavirus 'settled into the hardest cohorts' in Victoria
The Chief Health Officer, Brett Sutton, said the challenge in Victoria was "profoundly different from equivalent case numbers in any other jurisdiction of Australia".
He said many of the people infected in Victoria's second wave faced a challenging set of social circumstances.
"Through this second wave, the 20,000 cases that occurred across Victoria settled into the hardest cohorts and populations across the state, including in metropolitan Melbourne," he said.
Professor Sutton said while the average household in Victoria had 2.5 people, many of the households at the centre of clusters were much larger.
"We're thinking that, on average, the household sizes that we're following up are twice to three times that size," he said.
"That means more workplaces exposed, and it goes on exponentially. Those workplaces have people working there who have households that are two or three times the size of an average Victorian household.
"So, the number of close contacts per household, and the number of close contacts they have, is hugely different."
In NSW, which is still accepting international flights, returned travellers have accounted for about 60 per cent of cases over the past 10 days.
All of Victoria's cases were acquired locally.
The hotel quarantine program, which failed to contain the virus in Victoria, has so far been able to prevent the infections from leaking into the wider NSW community.
Victorian contact tracers can handle dozens of daily cases, CHO says
Professor Sutton said while NSW was seeing some increase in locally acquired case numbers, it was starting from a low base, whereas Victoria was coming down from 725 cases per day.
"We are not building up from a trickle of a small number of cases in small households," Professor Sutton said.
He pointed to Victoria's "challenges of casualised work, of cash-in-hand, of issues of visa status, issues of language and cultural barriers".
"If we had started with a few cases that were not really complex households, that were not really challenging circumstances, we might have been able to approach this very differently.
"What we had was 20,000 cases over several weeks that have come down to a very low level, but the remaining chains of transmission in Victoria are some of the trickiest, I imagine, in the world."
While the Chief Health Officer has repeatedly defended the state's contact tracing system, he also said yesterday that no jurisdiction could cope with hundreds of cases per day.
"It's clear that any country that has hundreds of cases per day doesn't do contact tracing at 100 per cent," he said.
"It doesn't matter where you are in the world."
He said the United Kingdom had a team of tens of thousands doing contact tracing, but was still only getting in touch with about two thirds of daily cases.
"So there are clearly limits to what contact tracing can manage," he said.
"But we've got a team of a size that could manage dozens and dozens of cases per day."
Professor Sutton said NSW's contact-tracing system had not seen the same level of pressure as Victoria.
"They have prospectively followed a small number of cases over recent months, where they've looked forward to the contacts that they have and managed them appropriately," he said.
https://news.google.com/__i/rss/rd/articles/CBMiamh0dHBzOi8vd3d3LmFiYy5uZXQuYXUvbmV3cy8yMDIwLTEwLTE0L2JyZXR0LXN1dHRvbi1zYXlzLWNhbnQtY29tcGFyZS1uc3ctdmljLWNvcm9uYXZpcnVzLW51bWJlcnMvMTI3NjE5NjDSASdodHRwczovL2FtcC5hYmMubmV0LmF1L2FydGljbGUvMTI3NjE5NjA?oc=5
2020-10-13 19:10:00Z
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