Just on testing and case numbers:
In Victoria's, and indeed every state's, first case surge many infected people will not have shown up as a confirmed case. In part as:
- Testing was very limited in availability
- Tests were rationed and went to those quite ill, or with a range of symptoms and or/severe symptoms
- If you had mild and or few symptoms you were just asked to self-isolate for 14 days and were not tested
So many infected people will never have appeared in the tests results, and so the true graphs of infected people are not actually known but will have been much higher that what the various graphs of Covid 19 cases now show.
Only a few locations such as aged care facilities or individual workplaces saw widespread or even complete testing. Though yest some widespread screening was later done of groups such as teachers or health care workers. And more recently f those in hotel quarantine.
Testing over time became more available everywhere.
With the apartment towers they are looking to try and achieve 100% testing of 3000 people. In the hotspot suburbs they are looking to achieve very high test levels including of people with no symptoms. Such high testing levels of cohorts within which Covid19 is prevalent of this scale has not been done before in Australia and not because health authorities did not want to, but simply as they did not have the resources to do so.
So while current positive case numbers per day are alarming, if we were were testing the same way as was being done in the first surge the positive case numbers per day would be a lot lower. How much lower is anyone's guess, but most of the asymptomatic cases and many with only mild symptoms would not have been tested.
So again I am not minimising the seriousness of this current outbreak, but it does give me hope that it can be controlled despite the minority of people who continue to do the wrong thing.