When Melbourne can expect coronavirus numbers to decrease
A leading Australian epidemiologist has no doubt Melbourne's stage four restrictions will curb Victoria's ballooning infection rate and believes cases should start to decrease in ten days.
Melbourne has woken up to its first full day of stage four coronavirus restrictions, after recording 671 cases yesterday.
In a bid to curb the health crisis Premier Daniel Andrews declared a state of disaster for Victoria, and announced a raft of new measures yesterday, including a 8pm - 5am curfew.
READ MORE: What does Victoria's State of Disaster mean for you?
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Victorian Police begin Patrols at 8pm on August 2, 2020 in Melbourne, Australia. Justin McManus/ Getty
Epidemiologist Tony Blakely from the University of Melbourne told Today he has no doubt the strict measures will work.
"We know that the stage four will work, we know from European countries when you go into this amount of lockdown the virus will go into retreat," Professor Blakely said.
"In about ten days from now we should hopefully start to see the curve going down.
"The reason stage three didn't work was because we had high levels of noncompliance. There just wasn't as much compliance as we had in our first wave."
The health expert "hates" to think what the state's numbers would be if masks weren't made compulsory more than a week ago.
Professor Blakely believes the case numbers in Melbourne are much higher due to dozens of "mystery cases" with no known source of transmission.
Hazardous waste is removed from St. Basil's Homes for the Aged in Fawkner on July 28, 2020 in Melbourne, Australia. Victoria has recorded 532 new cases of coronavirus and six more deaths, yesterday making it the worst day of the pandemic. Metropolitan Melbourne and the Mitchell shire remain in lockdown due to the rise in COVID-19 cases through community transmissions, with people permitted to leave home only for exercise, work, to buy essential items, or to access Darrian Traynor/Getty Images
"The hidden number of cases will be considerably higher," he said."Us experts sit around in the evening and we try to guesstimate – it might be another 50 per cent more than the daily case we are saying, maybe even double.
"It is hard to estimate."
He added coronavirus is "the sneakiest virus seen for 100 years".
An electron microscope image of the novel coronavirus. AP
"A third of the people are asymptomatic and those who are symptomatic are infectious for one or two days before symptoms. That is a recipe for disaster," Professor Blakely explained. "Human beings feel invincible. If we have a small cough we convince itself it is not due to COVID.
"One of the reasons we have gone to stage four is just so that people realise this is serious."
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