Yesterday saw Victoria’s daily COVID cases (867) overtake NSW’s (863), with the two jurisdictions also travelling on a very different trajectory:
Once you adjust for other factors, however, Victoria’s COVID outbreak is vastly worse than NSW.
First, NSW’s daily cases have been recorded off a testing base that is more than double Victoria’s:
Over the past week, 845,101 tests have taken place in NSW versus just 386,123 in Victoria.
Therefore, had Victoria undertaken as many tests as NSW, it is likely that its daily COVID cases would have been significantly higher.
Indeed, according to COVIDBaseAU, only 0.655% of the tests reported yesterday in NSW returned a positive result:
This was less than half the rate of Victoria, where 1.753% of the tests reported yesterday returned a positive result:
Even at the peak of NSW’s outbreak the percentage of tests recording a positive result was way below Victoria’s rate currently.
In a similar vein, NSW’s Reff yesterday was 0.87:
By contrast, Victoria’s Reff was much higher at 1.33 yesterday:
We also need to recognise that Victoria’s population (6.7 million) is significantly smaller than NSW’s (8.2 million). Therefore, on a per capita basis Victoria’s outbreak is much worse.
The only statistic where NSW is still tracking worse is COVID deaths. But there is good reason to believe that Victoria’s daily deaths will continue to rise as NSW’s falls – at least until NSW exits lockdown on 11 October.
