SYDNEY FACES 4 - 12 WEEKS IN LOCKDOWN!
Sydney might never get back to zero cases of COVID-19 without a Melbourne-style shutdown, and even tougher restrictions are needed for at least another month to avoid disaster, a leading epidemiologist has warned.
Professor Adrian Esterman said the NSW Government’s “incredibly light” initial lockdown had failed and the number of infections was accelerating at a faster rate than experienced in Melbourne a year ago.
He said NSW’s “gold standard” contact-tracing system simply couldn’t cope with the fastspreading Delta variant and when Premier Gladys Berejiklian did finally announce a lockdown it was nowhere near severe enough.
“If they don’t do anything else it will just keep getting bigger. They absolutely need to do more,” the University of South Australia’s chair of biostatistics said.
Professor Esterman called for department stores to be closed, a ban on exercising more than 5km away from home, a nightly curfew and a clearer definition on who can travel for work.
The NSW Premier yesterday said it was “almost impossible” for Sydney’s lockdown to end as planned on Friday after 112 new local cases were recorded, taking the outbreak to 678 infections.
While she refused to speculate how long stay-at-home orders would be required, disease experts told The West Australian that Sydney’s five million residents would need to stay in lockdown for another four to 12 weeks.
Seventeen days after lockdown began, Professor Esterman calculated the virus reproduction number in Sydney was at 2.5, which means on average every 10 people infected would infect 25 other people.
“It’s only likely to get worse than that, which means that the outbreak at the moment is really, really rapidly ramping up. It won’t take too much at this level for it to reach the level of Melbourne last year,” he said. “It’s also rising at a rate much faster than the Melbourne outbreak.
“Even if they get their effective reproduction number down to 0.5 — that means instead of it going up it goes down — it would still take at least a month to get (case numbers) down to single digits.”
Professor Esterman said if NSW continued to resist a draconian shutdown then Sydney might never drive community cases down to zero, raising the prospect of WA keeping a hard border with the State indefinitely while the vaccine is rolled out.
Burnet Institute epidemiologist Professor Mike Toole told The West Live host Ben O’Shea that NSW had to “bite the bullet” and introduce tougher Victorianstyle stage four-style restrictions.
“We know already that in Sydney their economy is taking a $1 billiona-week hit. If they had gone in earlier that might have been two or three weeks at the most,” he said.
“Now it’s going to drag on . . . I can’t see them coming out of this for another four weeks. So there’s an $8 billion hit to Sydney’s economy, which is an $8 billion hit to Australia’s economy.” Curtin University Pro Vice-Chancellor Archie Clements, a professor of infectious disease epidemiology, warned if authorities didn’t get the outbreak under control quickly the lockdown could last as long as Melbourne’s — 112 days.
“The problem is the longer you wait, the bigger the problem becomes. With the current situation with low vaccine coverage and the Delta strain circulating, Sydney needs to get on top of things as quick as they can,” he said.
Of the 112 cases in the 24 hours to 8pm on Sunday, at least 46 were out in the community for part or all of their infectious period. There are 18 COVID-19 patients in NSW in intensive care, with four ventilated.
La Trobe University epidemiologist Hassan Vally said tomorrow’s case numbers would be crucial in determining whether tighter restrictions introduced late last week had an impact.
“The big worry at the moment is the number of cases that have been detected in the community that are either infectious for some of their exposure period or for all of it and you would hope those numbers come back drastically by Wednesday,” he said.
Ms Berejiklian said the Government would further ramp up its vaccination drive, with the AstraZeneca jab to be made available to all people aged over 40 at NSW mass vaccination clinics. All NSW pharmacies will also be able to dole out the AstraZeneca jab to over-40s.
“Where the numbers are, it is not likely — in fact, almost impossible — for us to get out of lockdown on Friday,” she said. “Family or close friends, unfortunately, bear the brunt of those 112 (cases) we have seen overnight.
“If you put yourself at risk, you’re putting your entire family — and that means extended family, as well as your closest friends and associates — at risk.”
Reply With Quote
Originally Posted by Fodster
