Extract from ABC News
As the anxiety-inducing threat of yet another lockdown loomed on Wednesday, many Victorians were asking why these things always seemed to happen to us.
Was it bad luck, bad management by state or federal authorities or were Victorians themselves somehow to blame for becoming complacent?
Last year, Melbourne's hotel quarantine leaks were fuelled by a chronically under-resourced contact tracing network.
It led to the devastating second wave which invaded nursing homes, caused more than 800 deaths and months of heavy restrictions and lockdowns.
Then this February, leaks from hotel quarantine again plunged the state into a five-day circuit-breaker lockdown, with the infectiousness of the UK strain cited as a key concern.
So what's caused the lockdown this time?
Another hotel quarantine failure
Victorians are paying the price of a South Australian hotel quarantine system failure after genomic testing confirmed a returned traveller was infected while quarantining at an Adelaide medi-hotel.
He tested positive after returning home to Melbourne and the virus spread from there, with 30 cases now linked to the cluster and 150 exposure sites across greater Melbourne, the Mornington Peninsula and a smattering of sites in regional Victoria.
It's cold comfort for long-suffering Victorians that this time another state's hotel quarantine system is to blame.
It was the 17th leak from hotel quarantine in the past six months, according to federal Labor, which accuses Prime Minister Scott Morrison of inaction on national standards around quarantine ventilation and a mismanaged vaccine rollout.
Victoria has been lobbying the federal government to help it get a purpose-built quarantine facility built swiftly to strengthen the primary ring of defence that stops the virus from entering the community.
The state has earmarked a site at Mickleham in Melbourne's outer north.
Another site near Avalon Airport south-west of Melbourne near Geelong has also been mooted, but Victoria wants federal help to fund it.
On Thursday, shortly after Victoria's lastest lockdown was announced, the prime minister all but backed the state's proposal for a quarantine facility, but stopped short of confirming any details.
Mr Morrison has said the hotel quarantine system had been "99.9 per cent effective".
But epidemiologists including Michael Toole from Melbourne's Burnet Institute warned that Melbourne's latest outbreak highlighted the urgent need to overhaul the quarantine system.
"This disruption to the lives of people in Melbourne was caused by a leak from a hotel in Adelaide," he said.
Professor Toole said he did not understand how Prime Minister Scott Morrison could assert that hotel quarantine was "99.99 per cent effective".
"How can he say that? I really don't understand, sitting here in Melbourne with this cluster of … cases that was all due to a breach in hotel quarantine," Professor Toole said.
"And we've seen this over and over again, I'm not sure where he's getting that from.
"I often use the analogy that if you ran an airline and your planes only crashed one in 100 times, would you go on that airline?
"It's a ridiculous argument to make, the system either works or it doesn't."
"And we've seen, since November, 17 of these leaks in five mainland capital cities and I just think that's unacceptable.
"It has us on tenterhooks, it's almost every week we have this mini-crisis."
The infectiousness of the strain
Public health authorities are concerned about the "highly infectious" variant of COVID-19.
It is a version of what is called the "Indian variant", and it's spreading quickly in other countries as well.
Acting Premier James Merlino said the time between people catching the virus and passing it on was "tighter than ever".
The usual transmission of coronavirus is about five to six days, but in some cases this week that timeframe had narrowed to 24 hours.
Its rapid speed and reports that some people possibly delayed getting tested while they were symptomatic have not helped.
Authorities yesterday revealed the fifth recorded case in the cluster, which was probably the source of infection for the other 29, had likely been in the community while infectious for around 11 days.
The state's Chief Health Officer, Professor Brett Sutton, said even a "tickle in the throat", or "just a runny nose" should be the trigger to get tested.
"Don't think that it's something else," he said.
"Get that negative test and then assure yourself that you're not putting others at risk."
Epidemiologists and public health authorities have praised the work of contact tracers during this latest outbreak, but their work may not have been helped by the state's slow move to a mandatory single QR code app which only took effect yesterday.
Authorities welcomed the record 47,462 test results received on Thursday and continued to remind every Victoria who is eligible to get a vaccination, to act.
All
tiers of government agree vaccinations are the "game changer" that will
ultimately help Australia assert some degree of control over the
pandemic.
'Victoria has done fine'
Victorians feeling dismayed or angered by the latest lockdown might take some comfort from experts who say the state has actually been handling the pandemic well.
Epidemiologist Nancy Baxter said, overall, Victoria had been lucky.
The second wave was "in part, just bad luck" Professor Baxter said, with under-resourced public health systems, poor contact tracing and hotel quarantine leaks mainly to blame.
"I think you
should start after the second wave and look at the performance of the
system after the second wave and then I think you'll see that actually,
Victoria has done fine."
She said cases at a Black Rock Thai restaurant and a positive case from the Australian Open tennis were well managed earlier this year.
"People are awfully critical about anything that happens, anything that goes wrong, everyone just jumps on and some of this is luck.
"And we've been very lucky … I think that's what people don't realise, Victoria getting that second wave under control.
"Any of these states saying 'this is just Melbourne', wow, I mean a lot of them are way more vulnerable.
"Like if something happens in Queensland, they are toast," she said.
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