5 August

All through this pandemic Australians haven't engaged in the specific details. Instead they've played tabloid games, finding new scapegoats every day. Take the ridiculous hoo-ha about what's happened in Victoria. Blamed on quarantine breaches. They weren't the problem, NSW had a far bigger quarantine breach with Ruby Princess and was able to control it. Victoria exploded because National Cabinet 'opened up' the economy in mid-May, while Victoria still had community transmission happening. Clearly visible on the graph. This didn't happen with Ruby Princess in early March because there was no community transmission (virtually no Covid at all) in NSW prior to that date. So NSW was easily able to isolate and control that breach. The 2 bitter ironies for Victoria here are that its cases mostly came from Ruby Princess, and the community transmission it had still active in mid-May was them still controlling that. And secondly Victoria called for an elimination strategy at this same time, and National Cabinet refused. The lesson for Australia is, Victoria is what happens when you use a suppression strategy on Covid-19 while you have community transmission. It was only that other States had already eliminated (accidentally) that saved them.