Victoria’s new Roadmap to Deliver the National Plan was released 19 September by the Premier, Dan Andrews.
The Roadmap has been developed based on expert modelling from the Burnet Institute and is set against COVID-19 thresholds including hospitalisation rates, and the vaccination targets already set out in the National Plan to transition Australia’s National COVID-19 Response.
“The modelling helped the Victorian public health teams get a picture of what our hospitalisation rates could look like while cases are still rising and develop trigger points to indicate if the system is becoming overstretched – allowing time to implement further health measures and protect it from becoming overwhelmed,” Premier Andrews said.
“The Burnet modelling also shows that the key to opening up and reducing risk in Victoria will be making sure workers across the state are vaccinated.”
Modelling the Victorian roadmap
Since July 2021 Melbourne has experienced a resurgence in delta variant COVID-19 cases. Despite a lockdown being introduced on 5 August, cases continue to grow, and at 17 September daily diagnoses have reached a 7-day average of 454.
With Victoria’s COVID-19 strategy shifting away from COVID-zero, protecting the health of the population will require achieving high vaccination coverage as quickly as possible, maintaining control of the epidemic to protect the vulnerable, and ensuring that the health system has capacity to provide care to all who need it. An important question is: as vaccine coverage increases, how best can restrictions be eased that prevents health system capacity from being exceeded?
