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‘Terrifying’: How bad the Victorian COVID-19 outbreak may have been without tough lockdown rules

Tom Elliott
Article image for ‘Terrifying’: How bad the Victorian COVID-19 outbreak may have been without tough lockdown rules

Victoria’s Chief Health Officer has released the coronavirus modelling which the state government relied upon to determine what restrictions to put in place to fight the outbreak.

Neil Mitchell described the data as “terrifying”.

If Victoria introduced international travel restrictions and put people in isolation when they returned from overseas, but did not introduce any other lockdown restrictions, it’s expected the outbreak would have peaked at 650 deaths per day.

“Using the assumptions that were in the modelling originally, that there would be five unknown cases out in the community, and an introduction of two new cases every week, we would have gotten to 58,000 infections per day at the peak,” Chief Health Officer Brett Sutton said in a press conference.

If coronavirus had escalated to that point, 10,000 intensive care beds, including 7000 with ventilators, would’ve been required.

Victoria has planned for just 4000 intensive care beds.

“We were never going to let this be an unmitigated pandemic in Victoria,” Mr Sutton said.

We were always going to take actions that would flatten this curve, and they’ve been more successful than maybe we could have even imagined.”

Press PLAY below for more.

Tom Elliott
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