Victoria's contact-tracing effort buckles under the weight of Covid-19 cases

ANU ’s Peter Collignon says what’s important now is making sure people who test positive stay at homeStage 4 lockdown rules explainedDownload the free Guardian app to get the most important news notificationsCoronavirus Australia maps and cases: live numbers and statisticsVictoria ’s rise in Covid-19 case numbers is occurring so rapidly that contact tracing can no longer be relied upon to unearth all potential clusters in the state, according to epidemiologists who argue health detective work “won’t make much difference when you’ve got thousands of active cases potent ially out there”.On Tuesday morning, Brendan Murphy, secretary of the Department of Health, told the senate select committee on Covid-19 that delays had plagued Victoria ’s contact tracing regime “certainly for a period of a couple of weeks”, and that the backlog “has to have been a factor” in community transmission. However he said the state had made substantial improvements to contact tracing recently.Continue reading...
Source: Guardian Unlimited Science - Category: Science Authors: Tags: Victoria Coronavirus outbreak Infectious diseases Australia news Science Health Epidemics Source Type: news