Victoria's contact-tracing effort buckles under the weight of Covid-19 cases

ANU's Peter Collignon says what's important now is making sure people who test positive stay at home

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Victoria's rise in Covid-19 case numbers is occurring so rapidly that contact tracing can no longer be relied upon to unearth all potential clusters in the state, according to epidemiologists who argue health detective work won't make much difference when you've got thousands of active cases potentially out there".

On Tuesday morning, Brendan Murphy, secretary of the Department of Health, told the senate select committee on Covid-19 that delays had plagued Victoria's contact tracing regime certainly for a period of a couple of weeks", and that the backlog has to have been a factor" in community transmission. However he said the state had made substantial improvements to contact tracing recently.