Is that not because Aged Care is hit particularly hard?
And this will continue for at least another month. All in all it's rather amazing how by trying to do everything right the Victorian government has managed to do everything wrong.
At least the current government gets to wag its finger at people for wanting such unreasonable things as jobs, leaving your house after work, or sleeping with your partner for the first time in 3 months.
Consider that lockdowns cannot stop the virus forever. They were only ever pitched, even by advocates, as a delaying strategy to reduce pressure on hospitals. Total numbers of infected were never meant to change, as logic dictates. However lockdowns and other restrictions, when as long as they have been, do create new deaths by e.g. delaying cancer checkups and treatments, by causing job losses and subsequent poverty related deaths, by stopping the elderly from seeing their family - deaths by loneliness are a real thing in elderly care!
If you're going to assert that lockdowns can actually reduce the death rate rather than increase it you will need to give arguments for why that's the case, especially over the long term.
Try living under curfew for a few months and see if you still think that keeping 10000 people in their 80s alive for another two years is worth it.
It's worth noting that nobody until very recently was claiming lockdowns could eliminate outbreaks. That whole notion was deemed absurd as recently as June. The problem is obvious - for as long as there is a pool of people, somewhere, spreading the disease, and a large pool of people who haven't developed immunity, and international travel, then the virus will get in. Meanwhile lockdowns have catastrophic consequences far in excess of their benefits (halting COVID is not very important given how mild it is).
There's a lot of pile-on about how they've done everything wrong without a lot of suggestion about what they should've done instead / should currently be doing instead.
For example, if Andrews and co cave to the federal and local pressure and re-open the state today, and everything explodes in two weeks, who takes the blame then? Still Andrews and co.
While it's been a huge outbreak by Australian expectations, it's still tiny when compared to the rest of the world.
If we had the 10, 15,000 cases per million that are more commonplace around the world, there'd still be a stuffed economy, lower employment, increased mental health issues, right? We'd just have another layer of mess with hospital overload and death that we don't have in a large amount at the moment.
In short: open everything and let the devil take the hindmost. The alternative is a yo-yo lock down until Bangladesh manages to deploy a vaccine to everyone infected before the virus mutates, something that will happen in 202-never.
[0] Even the horror stories from New York were because they didn't have the capacity to bury people fast enough, not that they ran out of hospital beds.
New Jersey - At capacity, Elective surgeries cancelled
Alabama - Elective Surgeries Cancelled, state of emergency declared
California - set up tents outside, patients in hallways
Pennsylvania - Surge tents
https://english.elpais.com/society/2020-04-07/spains-intensi...
It discusses one of the hardest hit hospitals. However the absolute numbers were small and they never turned people away.
This sort of bed conversion is known to happen even in normal years, so it doesn't mean much by itself. Dramatic language can be misleading. Unfortunately it is standard for health officials to describe hospitals as "overloaded" or "at breaking point" simply due to seasonal flu outbreaks, as in these articles from 2017:
https://www.thelocal.fr/20170111/french-hospitals-stretched-...
https://www.euronews.com/2017/01/12/struggling-to-care-hospi...
Not a direct acquaintance, but a friend of my sister was two days siting in the hall of the Gregorio Marañon until they could transfer him to IFEMA. Almost no supply of food during these two days, and he was lucky to have a seat, many people lying on the floor.
They found many bodies of people dead by COVID-19 at home. They found some bodies on the streets.
I don't get how can you pretend that many hospitals / regions were "overload".
It's a debatable question whether this shutdown of hospitals was due to the virus, or due to the over-reaction to it. Other places where the virus started later didn't do this to the same extent (although the UK did and is still doing so!), and they saw less serious problems.
As for "many bodies of people dead at home/on the streets", can you show me reports of people dropping dead of COVID on the streets? I never heard that, it seems it hasn't happened elsewhere and sounds suspect.
Remember that basically all reports about people dying "of" COVID are garbage. The average age of death when testing positive is over the average life expectancy in most places (maybe all, I haven't checked). Almost all such reports are of deaths that were naturally happening anyway due to age or other serious health conditions, and COVID was just co-present at time of death - maybe it pushed them over by a little bit, but probably only by months. Correlation/causation mixups are a huge problem with COVID datasets.
NZ went for elimination from the outset so when the virus came back in Auckland several weeks ago it was a no-brainer to immediately lock down again (although now they seem to have shifted to a suppression strategy, let's see how that goes for them...).
Sweden went for a flatten the curve(ish) strategy which meant that they did not automatically enact a lockdown when things started heating up in terms of case numbers/deaths because they were confident enough at the time that their health care system would cope.
Those are two very different strategies with different outcomes but they were consistent and thereby achieved their respective goals.
Victoria (and Australia as a whole) has gone from flatten the curve to suppression and now to elimination. If Victoria had chosen elimination after the first flare up back at the end of May, then that would have most probably been achieved by now.
It really does not make much sense to unnecessarily restrict the times when people can, e.g., go out and buy groceries. The wider the allowed hours, the less density of people there will be in those indoor places, which will help decrease the spreading of the virus.
Probably not much. But that's because you used the word "doing". If you had asked "what should Victoria have done instead?", then there is a long list.
To pick on one thing, I was amazed press were showing people in the locked down towers apparently depending on charities for essential supplies. To this day don't know if it was a beat up or real, but if real it boggles the mind. It implies the lock down was little more than a thought bubble with almost no effort put into planning.
Obviously, they did eventually react to the collapse of contract tracing, the explosion of cases, the outbreak in nursing homes and so on, and as a consequence everything seems to be as under control as it can be now. But it does seem to all be reactive, not proactive.
I do wonder how the situation arose. At one level it's obviously a reflection of competence of the bureaucracy, as this is where the pollies (who usually have very little expertise in their portfolio) get their advice. But those same pollies have been there for 10 years and so they should by now have made their stamp on the culture of the bureaucracy. Frankly when you compare it's performance with bureaucracies in all other states, it was very poor. For me (a Queenslander) the outstanding state was NSW the Ruby Princess cluster fuck notwithstanding.