Daniel Andrews has said some Victorians are taking the stay-at-home message too seriously – to the point that not enough people are getting a Covid-19 test.
The premier was speaking on Tuesday as the state reported its lowest daily case numbers in a month.
Victoria had 222 new cases – the lowest number since 18 July when the state reported 217 cases – and 17 deaths, 13 of which were linked to aged care. The case numbers were expected to fall to the 100s next week, and the number of active cases in the state – currently at 7,274 – was “coming down by the hundreds each day”, the chief health officer, Prof Brett Sutton, said.
The health department on Tuesday told an inquiry into the state’s bungled hotel quarantine program that 99% of all current coronavirus cases in Victoria are linked to outbreaks at two inner-city hotels in May.
The Victorian premier said in the past seven days Victoria had conducted 155,000 tests – that’s a 17% reduction, or 35,000 fewer tests, than in the previous seven days. Almost two million tests have been conducted in the state so far in 2020.
Victoria processed more than 17,000 Covid-19 tests on Monday, down from a daily average of more than 20,000 tests over the past few months. Meanwhile, New South Wales recorded three new cases of Covid-19 in the past 24-hours and conducted 13,736 tests.
Andews suggested that people were now so reluctant to leave their homes – in accordance with stage four lockdown rules – that people with mild symptoms were not getting tested.
“I don’t want a situation where we see numbers continuing to fall but at the same time the number of tests falling also because that will mean we don’t have confidence that we have an accurate picture of how much virus is in the community,” Andrews said.
He added that “getting tested is just as important as following the rules – it is just as important as obeying the curfew”.
If testing numbers increase to levels seen earlier in the outbreak – when between 20,000 and 30,000 people were getting tested each day – the state would have confidence that it had a large enough sample size to show an accurate picture of the true number of positive cases.
Queensland has already said it will not reopen its borders until there is no community transmission in other states, and Tasmania announced on Tuesday that it would extend its border closure to 1 December. Western Australia pushed back its planned easing of restrictions by two months.
Sutton said for testing numbers to be robust, at least half of all people who have symptoms have to get tested.
People in Melbourne are allowed to travel outside of the 5km radius of their home to seek medical treatment such as a coronavirus test – but public messaging has focused on enforcement and deterrence, not the reasons people are allowed to travel.
Sutton said that “flu has disappeared” this winter, meaning there was a good chance cold or flu symptoms were Covid-19. There are about 10 flu cases diagnosed every week, compared to thousands of Covid-19 cases.
“We absolutely want people to go out and they are allowed to go out for testing purposes,” Sutton said. “But there will also be rise and fall in the concern that people have about coronavirus and a sense of concern for themselves.
“As numbers go down, the concern goes down … We need to have everyone who’s got symptoms thinking that it is coronavirus until proven otherwise, because we need the tests to be done to isolate the cases and follow up close contacts but to reduce transmission across the board.”
Sutton said the dramatic fall in flu cases meant that the number of lives ordinarily lost to flu had reduced. In the first eight months of last year, there were almost 600 influenza-related deaths in Australia.
“It’s also a salient lesson that we should do these things every flu season,” Sutton said. “When we are on the other side of coronavirus, things like masks will be very useful when we are coming out of the flu season.”
But he said that those lessons would extend to masks and hand hygiene, not lockdowns. “There will be no stage four for flu, I promise you.”
