In the last blog post, I talked about how low English literacy and high rates of no internet connection were found in the 10 COVID-19 hotspots across Melbourne and how this could hamper the government’s efforts to communicate public health measures to migrant and disadvantaged communities. Since then, the Victorian government has announced Stage three lockdowns across all of metropolitan Melbourne and Mitchell Shire in an effort to contain the outbreak. This has emerged as a result of many clusters popping up across all of Melbourne. In this blog post, I look into the origins of the COVID-19 outbreak in Melbourne by looking at the sources of infection in Victoria and NSW. I argue that it is not the sole fault of Victorians for failing to adhere to social distancing measures. Rather, it is failures in the Victorian government’s response to COVID-19 before and during the outbreak combined with the perpetuating local transmission among families that has started the COVID-19 outbreak in Melbourne.

In recent weeks, Victoria has seen a surge in COVID-19 cases while other states have no or a small number of cases. Even though the Victorian government has acted quickly to re-enact restrictions around Victoria and lockdowns in certain postcodes and public housing towers, the government has been heavily criticised for how it has handled the outbreak. The outbreak can be traced to breaches in hotel quarantine where security guards were infected and carried the virus to their families. Even though these breaches are currently being investigated under a judicial inquiry, multiple factors have contributed in expanding the outbreak to a large number of people. In this blog post, I will talk about how the Victorian government has failed to update Victorians on the changing COVID-19 situation and restrictions before investigating some of the factors behind this problem. I will end the blog post by drawing some lessons that all states should follow to continually inform people on the changing COVID-19 situation.

The use of hydroxychloroquine to treat COVID-19 has been highly controversial with conflicting studies showing the presence or absence of efficacy against COVID-19. Most of these studies are marred by flaws in their methodology and results which have not been fixed in the rush to quickly publish results. These mistakes are picked up after publication which have generated outrage among different people and led to the removal or retraction of some papers from academic journals. These indicate that peer review, a process that is supposed to pick up and fix flaws in studies before they are published, has not been carefully followed which is negatively affecting the science and medicine of COVID-19.

In this article, I will talk about peer review and how this process has faltered during the COVID-19 pandemic. In particular, I will talk about two papers: one paper has numerous flaws in its study but has not been retracted yet and the other paper had concerns which prompted the authors to retract the paper.