New COVID-19 modelling finds NSW’s hard decision to go into hard lockdown gives the State more certainty about how long they’ll be stuck in there
Objective:
We used an agent-based to simulate the current NSW outbreak under different COVID-19 policy scenarios, estimating the amount of time associated with different policies to bring the 14-day average number of cases to five.
Findings:
- Our modelling suggests the Stage 4 lockdown will reduce the number of daily cases to five or less (averaged over 14 days) within 5.8 weeks (90% UI: 4.6 to 7.5 weeks).
- Under Stage 3 restrictions or soft lockdown, we estimate reaching that target number would have taken 8.3 weeks (90% UI: 5 to 14 weeks).
- A Stage 2 scenario would likely have taken an unpleasant 14 weeks to get cases down to five per day, even allowing (as our model does) for increasing vaccine coverage at the same time.
- NSW made the hard decision to go into hard lockdown – but it’s the right thing to do. It will take less time to get rid of the virus, and add more certainty about how long it will take.
First published: Jul 20, 2021
Population Interventions Unit
The Population Interventions Unit is a research group at the University of Melbourne that investigates health and cost impacts of population interventions.
