Extract from ABC News
Analysis
Around the middle of this week, the people working for the NSW health system who do modelling on the likely path of a COVID outbreak started to feel a bit pale and queasy.
It wasn't that they had caught the disease — just the dreadful realisation of the extent to which the spread of the Delta variant was blowing out despite a partial lockdown, that it had almost certainly seeded in a whole new series of communities, probably including communities outside Sydney, and that they could no longer be sure they knew where all the chains of communication ran.
Thursday's official NSW figures, and particularly Friday's figures, illustrated these points and their implications starkly.
The number of close contacts of people found to be infectious in NSW doubled overnight between Thursday and Friday: from 7,000 to 14,000, including 2,000 linked to a case at an Ikea store.
There were 37 cases that had not been directly linked to a known case or cluster on Friday, with a further 117 linked to these 37 unlinked cases.
The number of people in hospital had jumped from 26 to 43 between Tuesday and Friday, including an increase from six to 10 in ICU with four people being ventilated.
And of those in hospital, 14 are aged under 55 and seven under the age of 35.
NSW's
Chief Health Officer Dr Kerry Chant told Friday's press conference:
"I'm just going to read this next piece very slowly. Of the 10 people in
ICU, one is in their 20s. One is in their 30s. One is in their 50s. And
five are in their 60s. And two are in their 70s."
The 'gold standard' state is in crisis
We get so many COVID-related numbers thrown at us these days it can be eye-glazing.
But these numbers demonstrated better than any others how the nature of the pandemic has morphed as much as the virus itself in the last couple of months.
It's no longer just about protecting old and vulnerable people. The chances that you will catch it from a casual contact are much higher.
It's a disease that is hitting people of every age, and hard. It's not just a race to vaccinate the vulnerable groups — it's a race to vaccinate everyone.
Politically, too, it is morphing. The all-too-easy politics that seemed to flow from Victoria's woes last year — the implicit message that it all came down to various forms of incompetence in one state — are also a thing of the past now that the "gold standard" state is in such a crisis.
This isn't just a shot at the fact the Prime Minister has put so much store on NSW Premier Gladys Berijiklean's handling of the pandemic in her state until now.
It is that so many more variables than tracing systems and hotel quarantine are now open to question, and set different political hares running.
It is vaccine supplies and distribution, and international travel caps. It is about resentments and realities of different communities in different parts of a massive city.
Politicians are treading carefully around the fact that many of these areas are both more socially disadvantaged and ethnically diverse.
As epidemiologist Professor Raina Macintyre told the ABC's 7.30 program on Thursday night, "the spread to a ... wider distribution around Sydney and to more disadvantaged parts of Sydney in the south west — that's really concerning".
"Also, it is concerning that in people over 70, in the affected areas, the vaccination rates are quite low compared to the rest of Australia."
In the rest of Australia, she said, there are quite high vaccination rates in the over 70s group, but in these particular areas "it is around 50 per cent".
Does the federal government need to step in?
There are also variables like lockdowns and how tough they are. And the politics now is inevitably about the economic fallout of what could be an extended lockdown and what the federal government does about this.
The federal government stared down calls for more assistance when Victoria had its last lockdown for a couple of weeks, limiting its assistance to disaster payments.
It is now under intense pressure to do a lot more for NSW because the lockdown is likely to be a lot longer: we know it is already going to be three weeks but, given the number of new cases — and the high rate of cases which have been infectious in the community — there is considerable pessimism that this will end any time soon.
The economic fallout will therefore be greater, which may explain why the state government has still not insisted on retailers other than essential services closing.
The state government has signalled there will be more assistance coming. State and federal governments are pressuring the banks to help their customers.
But that again raises the question of whether the federal government needs to step back into the household income support breach in a much more substantive way than it has since JobKeeper and the coronavirus supplement started to be unwound.
The real test going forward
In the meantime, the Prime Minister, after being absent from public view for most of the week, re-emerged on Friday in an early morning radio blitz to herald a new arrangement which would bring forward a substantial part of the contract with Pfizer already signed by Australia, but originally not due to be delivered until later in the year.
The result will be the weekly number of Pfizer doses jumps from about 300,000 a week last month to around a million a week by the end of this month.
This appears to be on top of a separate, but much smaller, allocation of around a million Pfizer doses he mentioned at press conference on Thursday, which was essentially a bring-forward of doses from the next couple of weeks.
The combination of not having briefed the media on the new deal — apparently finalised late on Thursday — but then having it leaked it to The Australian, then talking about the new deal in morning media interviews, combined with possibly conflicting-sounding information from Pfizer, was not the best way of instilling confidence that everyone knew what they were actually doing.
The real test now, with more vaccines available, will be how quickly the systems to distribute it can be ramped up.
The systems now being used are not the historic ones. For example, most vaccination programs, like the flu, have been run in the past by the states. The distribution of vaccinations to chemists have been run by a taxpayer-subsidised pharmaceutical distribution network.
This time, it is the federal Health Department running things, using DHL to distribute Pfizer and LinFox/StarTrack to distribute AstraZeneca.
These deliver directly to GPs and to state vaccination hubs. The orders are placed "manually" but apparently "a new online system is being introduced", according to one state health service.
Just how these systems cope as the number of people going through GP clinics, state hubs, chemists and even businesses rises exponentially is yet to be seen.
There are so many questions — like how will the system cope with officially registering vaccinations back to official immunisation registers?
The logistics are enough to make you feel pale and queasy.
Laura Tingle is 7.30's chief political correspondent.
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