Epidemiologist sounds warning to NZ

A Melbourne epidemiologist says the increased restrictions that came into force on Sunday night were ‘‘overdue’’ as the state of Victoria tries to control a second wave of Covid19 cases. RNZ reports.

A MELBOURNE epidemiologist says the increased restrictions that came into force on Sunday night were ‘‘overdue’’.

Prof Tony Blakely told RNZ’s Morning Report it would have been good to see the state go harder earlier and the numbers kept increasing because of complacency.

A quarter of those who were meant to be in isolation were not found at home when visited by the authorities, he said.

Despite building up contact tracing capabilities early to deal with any outbreaks, that had ‘‘clearly failed’’, he said, with daily cases exceeding the state’s capacity.

‘‘That means we’re getting more and more of the cases of community transmission — the mystery cases as Premier [Daniel] Andrews calls them, the ones where we don’t know where it came from.

‘‘We’re well over 50 a day of those, so we’ve lost control of the contact tracing, therefore we need a stage four sort of lockdown.’’

Even the contact tracing app had proved to be hopeless in the face of the second wave, Dr Blakely said.

On the other hand, New South

Wales had done a ‘‘phenomenal’’ job so far in its contact tracing effort, he said, but it was now also being pushed to its limits.

‘‘NSW is tinkering on the edge at the moment.’’

Whether New Zealand would be able to handle any community transmission outbreak on a big scale is yet to be seen. But Blakely said he believed it had a lot to do with luck as well as the capacity and strategies.

’’The virus has a mind of its own or stochastic, if you like. For example in the quarantine leakage here, it first went out through some security guards and happened to get to a couple of super spreaders early on, and that type of bad luck early on can just tip you right over the edge.

‘‘There’s no way you can be confident with [an outbreak of] 100 that you’ll get on top of it, because a third of the people who are asymptomatic and the other people who are going to be symptomatic are infectious for one to two days before they become symptomatic.’’

He said one thing Melbourne had done really well, and New Zealand could learn from, was the quick adaptation to masks.

They need to be stockpiled in suburbs so people had quick access to them within 24 hours should a situation occur, he said.

The New Zealand Government had indicated early on that it would consider region or citywide lockdowns if the situation called for it.

However, he did not see such a strategy in a great light, and if it happened in New Zealand it would need to be stringent.

‘‘If you had a leakage from a quarantine . . . you would want to have a wide hotspot. So if there was one leakage into

Auckland you’d probably want to first put into Level 3 lockdown half of Auckland or all of Auckland.

‘‘You’d need to have a very wide geographic range to get ahead of the virus, both for the fact that the virus may have jumped out of the identifiable hot spot and be spreading silently but also because of the travel.

‘‘Unless you put a really hard ringfence around with military and police, completely sealing off the suburbs . . . you have to take extraordinary measures. So the hot spot strategy is looking not that great.’’

Blakely said he did not believe surveillance testing was too much of an issue for New Zealand now considering it had no community cases, ‘‘as long as you’ve got the surge capacity to increase it when you need to’’.