Quick note about how I think people might interpret long lists of potential exposure sites. In a nutshell, they hear COVID! COVID ERRYWHERE!

I hear: 'we traced a lot of people carefully and here are all their movements' — it's a signal the system is working.

Something to remember: the R0 is about 2.0-2.5 over the entire life of the infection. There are superspread events, for sure, but over 10 days, cases infect about 2-3 people on average. That tells us that casual contact is generally not highly infectious.

We've known that since early in the pandemic and the two risk scenarios haven't changed since then:

- 15 mins face-to-face (e.g. doctor-patient encounter)
- 2 hours in an enclosed space together (e.g. wedding)

It's *generally* not 'stood in a queue behind a case at Coles.'

So these potential exposure sites are listed out of an abundance of caution – their publication does not imply there was high risk at each one, and it's not a measure of the geographical scope of the outbreak.

I've been reflecting on this because certain commentators assumed NSW's clusters (Crossroads etc) were out of control because NSW Health kept publishing detailed lists of sites that cases and contacts had visited... when in fact it signalled contact tracing was keeping up.

Thus we had the paradoxical claim that NSW must have hidden cases because look at all this data on cases.

The same people thought Vic was crushing it with their response, which didn't feature much of the same data, precisely because their contact tracing had collapsed.

So what's going on there?

In a nutshell, panicked people insist that governmental responses must match their emotional state. A careful, nuanced case-by-case approach doesn't appeal. A whole-of-society, shut-it-all-down-now response *feels* emotionally congruent to a panicking person.

What we need to remember is the gruelling emotional and physical cost of lockdown for Melbournians, even though they fully understood and endorsed the need for it. You don't go into lockdown unless it's clear contact tracing isn't keeping on top of new cases.

I think there's also a perception that Vic went from 1-2 cases in hotel quarantine to hundreds and then thousands in the space of a week or two... it was months. It was multiple weeks of unnoticed transmission before a guy cut his thumb off at work and happened to get screened.

So there may be a fear that the same thing is happening now here in NSW.