It's pretty clear Dopey and his gang dropped the ball on testing and tracing for a time....no surprises there.
Now that our resident Norman Swan has gone some way to explaining the meaning of Ro and the effective rate, Re, what does it all mean?
First, indeed, Re is a subset of the Ro number - taking into account the level of susceptibility in the population - and, as we've seen in the States, we aren't necessarily one homogeneous population. Which also goes a large way to offering an explanation as to why herd immunity appears to be reached at much lower population infection rates than originally estimated.
But back on point. What is clear is that, by definition, the effective rate, Re, is a leading indicator of where the bug is going - getting it under 1.0 is the goal. If the rate of secondary infection is less than 1 to 1, it must peter out.
What stupefies me is that when they chose to reimpose Stage 3 restrictions over Melbourne, the Re had been trending consistently south toward zero (so why do it?) and there is NOTHING (as evidenced by the slope ie the rate of change of the Re line) to suggest the NPI measures (lock down, masks etc.) hastened speed of decline.
And even to be exceedingly generous, let's ignore the Stage 3 stuff.
The actual Re (and the modelled Re too) fell below 1.0 well over a week before our Chairman went for these INSANE Stage 4 measures!
Justification?
None.
Now that our resident Norman Swan has gone some way to explaining the meaning of Ro and the effective rate, Re, what does it all mean?
First, indeed, Re is a subset of the Ro number - taking into account the level of susceptibility in the population - and, as we've seen in the States, we aren't necessarily one homogeneous population. Which also goes a large way to offering an explanation as to why herd immunity appears to be reached at much lower population infection rates than originally estimated.
But back on point. What is clear is that, by definition, the effective rate, Re, is a leading indicator of where the bug is going - getting it under 1.0 is the goal. If the rate of secondary infection is less than 1 to 1, it must peter out.
What stupefies me is that when they chose to reimpose Stage 3 restrictions over Melbourne, the Re had been trending consistently south toward zero (so why do it?) and there is NOTHING (as evidenced by the slope ie the rate of change of the Re line) to suggest the NPI measures (lock down, masks etc.) hastened speed of decline.
And even to be exceedingly generous, let's ignore the Stage 3 stuff.
The actual Re (and the modelled Re too) fell below 1.0 well over a week before our Chairman went for these INSANE Stage 4 measures!
Justification?
None.
Finals, then 4 in a row!