All of Victoria is in a snap lockdown, with the same Level 4 rules applied across all of Victoria. But the 5km rule (cannot travel more than 5km from home unless essential services are not available within 5km) simply does not make sense in regional Victoria. Surely the reason for the 5km rule is to limit the number of people you may come in contact with, and to make contact tracing easier if you do come in contact with the virus. So looking at a random Melbourne suburb – Box Hill – a 5km radius means you could theoretically come into contact with the 63,405 people (2016 figures) living there. But of course, everyone else can travel 5km too, so we actually need to look at a 10km radius, where theoretically you could come into contact with 215,298 people, if you all travelled to the radius of your 5km. Woah, that’s over 3 times as much, let’s keep the radius small because the number of people you come into contact with grows exponentially! Fair enough, that’s a lot of people, clearly we need to limit this. And I don’t know how many shops are within that 5km radius of Box Hill, but it must be dozens if not hundreds.
Now let’s look at a regional city. If you live in central Wodonga, there are 25,374 people within your 5km radius (34,493 within 10km if everyone travels). Hmm, no longer exponential, it probably wouldn’t make much difference with a larger radius. Still, people in Wodonga have access to dozens of shops and at least 8 supermarkets within their 5km.
What if you live in north Wodonga? Well, there are fewer people (8,681) – and services – within your 5km, but guess what? The border is within 5km, so off you go to Albury where there are no restrictions and you will come into contact potentially with thousands of people. Seems a bit random.
And then what of the outlying suburbs and towns? Baranduda is 10km from Wodonga, with only 2,346 people within 5km, and 4,005 within 10km. There is one General Store within 5km. But we’re allowed to travel further to the closest supermarket in South Wodonga. So why even have the 5km limit – we can travel further anyway, and even within 20km it turns out there are only 27,970 people – still less than half of the people within 5km in Box Hill.
Then there’s the lovely little town of Tangambalanga. Within 5km there are 991 people and a handful of small shops. You could go to 10km (1,124 people) or 20km (4,204) and still be nowhere near the number of people Melburnians can come into contact within 5km. Again they can travel to their nearest supermarket, and if the whole town is travelling to either Tallangatta or Wodonga, why have a 5km limit at all?
From a health management perspective, the 5km rule makes sense in densely populated cities. It makes little sense in smaller cities, and no sense at all in regional communities, as no one can adhere to it and access essential services anyway. So if there is no health imperative to constrain regional Victorians to 5km, why are they being denied the level of access to services that city folk have? Don’t get me wrong, there are clearly equity issues in the city too, where more affluent suburbs have access to better shops and restaurants within their radius compared to lower socio-economic suburbs. But there is perhaps still a health imperative there to restrict movement. But again, without the health imperative (both due to lack of population density and lack of virus presence) in regional Victoria, why exactly are we being constrained to 5km?
(And I haven’t even started on why a circle is problematic when people don’t actually go as the crow flies, so the 5km should be measured on road distance – so where there are fewer roads, your accessible area within 5km is even further diminished compared to the cities.)