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After 112 days in lockdown last year, a massive overhaul of hotel quarantine and improvements in contact tracing, Melbourne was cautiously optimistic it was better prepared for COVID-19 outbreaks in 2021. 

What it and other cities across Australia and the world weren’t prepared for was the Delta variant. 

Just like Sydney, Melbourne had a brush with Delta in early May this year, when a man who had completed 14 days in quarantine in South Australia returned to Victoria infectious. Victoria went into a 14-day lockdown but soon appeared to get on top of the cases with a small cluster of 20 contained. 

But the city’s success was short-lived. Here’s what went wrong. 

Bouncing in and out of lockdown 

Melbourne’s scare with Delta ended on June 10 when lockdown ended, but freedom lasted only five days. 

Another snap lockdown was announced on July 15 after two New South Wales removalists travelled into the state while infectious, moving items without face masks. They weren’t honest about where they’d been and tested positive only after returning to NSW. Victoria’s COVID response commander Jeroen Weimar said “books [would] be thrown” at them when the time came. 

“I’m exceptionally frustrated at the pace and transparency of the information coming from the removalists’ exposure,” he said. “That’s been a real matter of concern.” 

As well as the removalists, Delta had been spread at an AFL game at the MCG on May 23, (attended by Treasurer Josh Frydenberg although he wasn’t in the exposed area), and through a family from Hume returning from Sydney.

While tensions were high, it appeared the outbreak had been contained, with fewer than 30 new daily cases. This fifth snap lockdown lasted nearly two weeks, prompting anti-lockdown protests with more than 13 million people — about half of Australia — placed under restrictions. Victoria opened up again on July 27. 

Again, freedom was short-lived. The cases hadn’t been contained. After just nine days with eased restrictions, Victoria entered its sixth lockdown on August 5. The virus had spread across the multicultural region of Hume where many people work in warehouses and factories.  

Tensions began to rise politically, with Premier Dan Andrews hitting out at the removalists and at vaccines given to Sydney to curb the outbreak.

“If we could send it back to Sydney we would,” Andrews said in late August. 

Back luck, fatigue and failures

Chair of epidemiology at Deakin University Professor Catherine Bennett tells Crikey Victoria was too quick to lift its restrictions. While previously it had waited for its heralded “doughnut day” of zero new infections, this time restrictions were eased when there were 10 new daily cases. 

“Victoria looked at Sydney’s containment, and rushed out of lockdown,” she said. “We had lots of unlinked cases, which is a signal it’s a mature outbreak. By the time they found them, they had been in the community for some time and it was widespread.”

Fatigue played a big factor: Testing rates were low — fewer than half as many tests were being conducted in late September in Victoria than in NSW — and movement trends showed Melburnians were not staying at home as much as in previous lockdowns, with a “slow explosion” of cases. 

“The virus had already got its tentacles into the community,” Bennett said. 

According to biostatistics and epidemiology expert at the University of South Australia Professor Adrian Esterman, Melbourne experienced a bout of bad luck. And importantly with Delta, it takes only one fatigued person not following the rules to cause an outbreak to skyrocket. 

“Victoria was doing quite well at bringing numbers down, but then we had a lack of compliance because people were fatigued and that contributed to case numbers,” he said. 

Most COVID rhetoric has focused on the R-value — the average number of people each infected person infects — rather than the K value, the number of people who transmit the disease to others. Esterman says about 10% of infected people cause 80% of infections, often in superspreader events such as parties or gatherings. 

“If you’re trying to stop an outbreak, you stop superspreader events, and yet no one seems to focus on them,” Esterman said. 

Tensions rise

On August 21, violent protests erupted in Melbourne, this time with up to 4000 attendees after a pause on construction. The direct impact of the protests on transmission isn’t known — Esterman says many protesters probably met up and travelled together, potentially spreading the disease indoors. Anti-vaxxers were also less likely to get tested.

By October 4, Melbourne marked 245 days indoors and became the city with the longest cumulative time in lockdown in the world. 

Next: How the bungled vaccine rollout led Australia into lockdown.