Victoria recorded a record 725 new coronavirus cases in 24 hours, but Epidemiology Chair at Deakin University, Professor Catherine Bennett, urged people “don’t be thrown” by the record number of cases.
She explained that measures such as the intense new lockdown do stop infectious people from going to work or interacting with others, which leads to new outbreaks.
“What we’re doing as part of lockdown won’t impact the daily numbers now but it does stop the next outbreak from starting,” Prof Bennett said to news.com.au.
“It is going to take time for us to contain those larger outbreaks and it won’t be until after these are contained that we will see change in daily reports.”
She said that the high number of cases made it harder to see improvements that are linked to lockdowns or mask wearers int the community.
“The thing that stands out to me when I look at all these numbers objectively, are the 249 new active aged care cases and another 164 that were linked cases,” she said.
Wednesday’s 725 cases had 164 linked to outbreaks or complex cases, which appears to be a new record.
In comparison, linked cases have hovered between 34 to 82 cases in the last couple of weeks.
“Usually there have been about 50 linked cases a day, often they come in a batches from cluster settings and the results are published together,” Prof Bennett said.
“But this jumped to 164. This tells us this is a spike due to linked cases pushing the numbers up above what we’ve had the last few days.
“Combined with the 250 active cases in aged care, it helps us to see how daily numbers can be driven by existing clusters.”
Professor Bennett said that as authorities follow up the close contact of those in known clusters, there are bound to be more cases to be uncovered.
“We have to be prepared to still see more fluctuations,” she said.
“But if the new cases are linked to known clusters then that’s telling us these are already at some level of containment.”
Again, the new measures can’t be seen if they’re working due to the rapid spike in cases.
“The measures are working but it’s hard to see when we have a day of hard numbers,” she said.
“It’s frustrating because it was hoped masks would make a difference to daily numbers but the reality is this is still not visible.
“Unfortunately with 250 active cases linked to aged care, it’s hard to see a reduction of 50 cases because people are wearing masks.”
