Three components of the way out of lock-down for Australia--The proactive COVID-19 suppression strategy

Scott Morrison on the three metrics Australia must reach in a virus suppression strategy:

The PM is talking about the way out again. This will be a long one:

The first of those is a more extensive surveillance, or sentinel as it is called, testing regime.

So beyond those who are symptomatic, if we are to move to a different phase when it comes to the restrictions, we need an even broader testing regime than we have at this point.

Now, we have one of, if not, the most extensive testing regime is in the world today. But we need to do even better than that to make sure that we can have greater confidence that when we moved to a lesser restriction environment we can have confidence we can identify any out breaks very very quickly and respond to them.

The second part of that is making sure we have an even greater tracing capability than we have now.

I want to commend the State Governments, this has been the really heavy lifting they have been doing over the last several weeks, and really boosting capability of tracing cases, they are a team of Sherlock Holmes is out there at the moment and they are doing a fantastic job on tracking down these cases.

We need to lift that to an industrial capability and do that using technology and we need to do that as soon as we possibly can, and we will be needing the support of Australians, if we can get that in place get the tracing capability up from where it is that will give us more options and Australians more freedoms.

The third area we need is a local response capability. And we are seeing this in part right now for north-western Tasmania, where we have an outbreak.

(From today's 16 April 2020 Press Conference)

Not so very different from standard public health action:

Also at the PM Press conference:

Some now-casting of what is happening (already familiar to attentive readers of recent posts at this blog) that is explained in more detail in the next postings.