The media, politicians & public MUST make sure of not losing sight of the wood for the trees. While I'm on a roll let's look for the silver lining
before normal transmission is resumed.
- Patient Zero came from a quarantine hotel not in a CV facing role. The outbreak happened, just not with the worst case it first appeared as (so far!).
- It was not detected for an extended period - revealed no regular mandatory testing regime ANYWHERE in Australia.
- Multiple workers from SA quarantine hotels have a second job - revealed State authorities (not just in SA) still have not learned from NSW & Vic outbreaks.
- If not for a (unnamed) extremely conscientious doctor this could have spread much wider before the first symptomatic case occured. If reports are to be believed the ratio of asymptomatic to symptomatic cases for this outbreak is 9:1. What else failed in the monitoring system?
- SA went into overdrive trying to track down all possible contacts from an event that dated back around 10 days & clearly their plans were found wanting for the first 5 days.
- Insufficient pre-planning for testing centres to cope with reasonably expected number of people presenting - but by day 7 seemed to get on track. Who failed to make these plans in the previous 8-9 months? What else remains lacking?
- People lie (one of the best lines IMHO in the series "House") - perhaps this will go down as the Australian non-Politican record! Revealed that SA's preparation is woefully flawed with zero penalty for lying to contract tracers, not even a $10 fine can be levied.
- Suggests that the contact tracing questions template for businesses may be deficient - Q1: List all employees, their contact details & when they worked over the preceeding 2 weeks.
- Someone involved who had their doubts about the liar should be made South Australian of the Year!
Imagine, however, that the person did not lie. That they had contracted CV from handling a pizza box for their takeaway order, & they worked in the Stamford Hotel for an extended period after infected
vs actually also a worker at the pizza shop.
A typical pizza shop will sell between 300 to 500 pizzas per night. As the CV had been around for at least 5 nights by then potentially their could be say 4,000 households that could have been infected. How many different schools would that have covered? How many different businesses?
At 30 contacts per person & 3 people per household = 360,000 people to interview. That's just the 1st round & btw = 20% of SA's entire population due to the pizza shop.
If faced with those figures as the best available information - I would lock down the state. How many of those people work in aged care - you can see the nightmare scenario. Given how the entire country watched the Melbourne outbreak gain momentum -
I'd opt to try and prevent hundreds of deaths.
As all of Europe is showing - under-react and people pay with their lives, over-react you're wrong unfortunately people suffer monetary losses. So far globally there's been far too few over-reactions.
Some of the questions the journalists were asking makes me wonder where they got their degrees
In the cornflakes box!
but they were asking the same questions again and again - Stevens clearly said there is no provision for penalties under the Emergency Management act to charge the guy who lied with anything.
Remember they all want their voice heard or video shown on their respective media channels, not the competition's. Self-interest rears its ugly head yet again.
And yes there was a possibility the lie was true. However the question remains as to why the interview from this person was so persuasive that SA used such draconian measures, as nothing else to date suggests that such measures were warranted.
Potentially 20% of SA population exposed within 1 generation from pizza shop contamination if TRUE that infection came from pizza box collection.
Is this the fault of SA or a possibly too heavy handed response from Tasmania? It's a thorny question I know, but might it have been sensible to ascertain whether any of the visitors were likely to have come into contact with Adelaide's very small cluster? The wilderness walk people were in a closed system. Fairly easy to contact trace them, why interrupt their walk?
After NorthWest cluster - it is a case of 'Bang, stop or I'll shoot'.
If the info had been correct then potentially everyone the walkers met risked infection. Much cheaper to fly the helicopter to get them vs shutting down Tasmania. Imagine you were the walkers coming the other way & your State Govt risked you catching CV instead of spending $1,400 to use a helicopter?
) and that Christmas is back on again.Not forgetting the SA walkers on a wilderness track who got helicoptered out to go into quarantine!
