Victoria's roadmap out of Covid lockdown is 'a sledgehammer approach', expert says

Prof Catherine Bennett says it's important for the public to understand how modelling data is being used to determine the lifting of restrictions

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The Victorian government has taken a sledgehammer approach" to its roadmap out of lockdown when a hammer may have been just as effective", Deakin's chair of epidemiology Prof Catherine Bennett has said.

Bennett said it was important for the public to understand that the model, developed by computer scientists and epidemiologists from the University of Melbourne, assumed all cases of Covid-19 in the community were randomly distributed, and that all cases are mixing in the community in the same way. In reality, many cases are already in isolation, or are part of outbreaks in workplaces where transmission and movements may be different.