1050 tests conducted yesterday and only 150 not at home
Still you wonder what those 150 people were doing?
It helps that I've a daughter who's a paramedic, and know several doctors, people working in the health department and someone working in Victoria Police. They've given me the story.
The federal health dept reports that in the last week of July about 6% of the covid+ ended up in hospital; worldwide the average is 20%, but that's probably an overestimate since many countries test poorly.
The Department of Health and Human Services administers tests and keeps their results, passing the list of covid+ people directly to ESTA, which is the unit dispatching emergency services to here and there. However, despite managing hospitals, the DHHS does
not pass on lists of hospitalised people to the police, and the DHHS and ESTA otherwise have no communication, as that would violate patient privacy (patient privacy was one of the contributing factors to the spread in meatworks, as DHHS could not tell a workplace that So-And-So had tested positive).
Thus, of the 1,150 people whose door was knocked on, 69 to 250 could be expected to actually be in hospital. 150 is bang in the middle of that.
As well, the DHHS in some cases has given lists of covid+ names to ESTA
before notifying the individual involved, and people awaiting test results (typically 2-5 days, but a bit under 10% had to wait 10 days for results) are
not required to self-isolate if they are asymptomatic or mildly symptomatic - which at least 80% of people are. Police have thus knocked on someone's door, "We're just checking to see if you as a covid positive person are home as required, good to see," and the person's replied, "I tested positive? They didn't tell me yet."
There have also been a number of cases where an aged care resident had a relative's address as their mailing address, as that person handled all their correspondence, bills and so on, and the police knocked on that door.
And there are of course a small fraction of actually wrong addresses and numbers recorded in the system. A friend of mine had to pursue the DHHS for her test results after 6 days, it took her another 5 days to discover that they'd got one number in her mobile phone number wrong; the system didn't allow them to correct this and she had to take a second test. She was mildly symptomatic and thus not required to self-isolate while awaiting results, had the police knocked on her door one day they might have found her out at the shops.
Between the hospitalised, those awaiting test results and wrong addresses, I'm impressed the no-answer rate is only 13%.
This is known in government, however it's not talked about because it doesn't fit the narrative, which is that "Victorians are irresponsible, so we have to have this tough lockdown." If in fact the people are almost all following the rules, and yet we
still have rising infections, then that indicates that
either: the lockdowns are ineffective, and something else needs to be tried
or: this virus is going to be with us for a long time, and we have to find a way to live with it
since neither of those conclusions support the narrative, the data - that Victorians are in fact adhering very closely to the restrictions - is ignored or denied.