Comparison of Sydney and Melbourne Outbreaks

This is an update to this post: Sydney vs Melbourne Outbreaks

Since the previous instalment, Sydney's transit rates have ticked up marginally. In the meantime, hospitalisations have increased relatively steeply.

Around the same time last year, Melbourne's transit figures started to really dip to get to the troughs of low 10s. Sydney is currently still hovering around 24%.

It may be that the clearly arbitrary choice of using the same date exactly a year apart means that we are still effectively in an "earlier" phase of the Sydney outbreak. It would be possible to use other points of origin - original case, first hospitalisation, first lockdown, etc, and we might look at that down the track. What is interesting about the current alignment is that mobility has followed fairly similar paths since converging from different initial levels. That is the highlight and the curiosity.

Sydney may follow Melbourne in the coming days in terms of mobility. Alternatively, it may be that the NSW government's decisions are determined, in part, by hospitalisation numbers. The recent spike, if it continues, may force a tougher lockdown that sends transit usage down to the lower levels in Melbourne last year.

About These Images The chart is based on data from Apple's mobility dataset.