CV and mad panic behaviour

[Mav]

Interesting claim by Raphael Epstein:

Who is defined as a close contact?

This is a crucial question because so many of the daily new cases in Sydney are out and about while infectious.

From a distance, it looks like NSW is counting close contacts in a way that only catches about a third as many people as the contacts currently tracked by Victoria.

This May, Victoria had over 100 primary contacts for every case. Going on Saturday's count, NSW would have had over 50,000 on that method but it declared only 15,000.

Victoria learnt a hard and bitter lesson. You need to identify not just the "contact", the person who had been to an exposure site.

You need to identify all the contacts of each of those contacts. And then you need to go further to the third ring: the contacts of contacts of contacts. And they all need to be asked to isolate until the closest contact to the initial case has been cleared by a health department.

It was well into November last year before Victoria learnt this lesson.

Four questions NSW needs answers for as its COVID outbreak intensifies, abc.net.au

Is this true? If so, the NSW contact tracing system is hardly the “gold standard”.

If only AFL coaches had been seconded to run the pandemic response across Australia. The AFL is a monkey-see, monkey-do industry. There’s no copyright or patents: if a competitor is doing something right, you copy it. If you don’t know what the secret ingredient is, you poach a coach or player to tell you. But it seems politicians are more worried about maintaining their brand rather than learning from others.