Originally Posted by
ruprecht
So.... 99.5% effective?
Yeh, I saw that statement in Parliament and thought to myself he better have the exact figures to back that up or he's just misled parliament and should resign.
I never watch the whackos on Sky normally but they had an interesting guy on the other day, he's an expert in demographics and he pointed out one of the potential reasons that NSW, who also has hotel quarantine, hasn't had the number or size of outbreaks that Victoria has - having lived in both cities I think he's got a point, saying that Sydney with the bulk of New South Wales' population is basically like a set of regions separated by sunken rivers, the harbour, etc. so it is not as common or as 'easy' to move around between suburbs or rather, there's not a tendency to do so with places like the northern beaches and Sutherland, etc. being almost peninsula's surrounded by rivers. In contrast, Melbourne/Vic is (to use his analogy) is like a 'fried egg', it has a centre and splays out flat in every direction with parallel roads and very few rivers or any natural barriers as such being more contiguous so the tendency is for one community to spill over into another, etc. in their daily activities, facilitating greater spreading opportunities for things like COVID.
He compared NSW and Victoria because they have similar size populations. It would be interesting to go back and see if the spread of Spanish Flu was more severe in Melbourne in the 20s than Sydney. I believe he excludes places like Perth from his analysis because WA has a vast natural barrier from other States and Adelaide/SA for similar reasons and because it's small.