Coronavirus Victoria: Active COVID-19 cases drop by 2291 - NEWS.com.au

The number of active coronavirus cases in Victoria has decreased dramatically in 24 hours to the state’s lowest total in three weeks.

There were 7155 active cases of COVID-19 on Wednesday and 4864 by Thursday.

“The eagle-eyed among you will notice that there’s been a sharp decrease in the number of active cases – 2291 since yesterday,” Victorian deputy chief health officer Professor Allen Cheng told reporters on Thursday.

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Prof Cheng said the process of clearing active cases, called “release from isolation”, is not simple but work had ramped up in the last few days.

“For most people, it involves a case interview that’s a bit like the opposite of the case investigation that we do at the start,” he said.

“So it does take an assessment by a trained health professional. What it does involve is making sure that their symptoms have cleared and enough time has lapsed since the start of their illness to allow them to be released from isolation.

“But for some cases – for some patients who have ongoing symptoms or people that have more severe disease that are in hospital or have been in hospital, or for some that have impaired immune systems, they require additional swabs.

“It’s not a simple process. A lot of work has gone in over the last couple of days to clear people from isolation so that they can go back to their normal activities.”

Explaining the significant drop in a short period of time, Prof Cheng said the interview process had been allocated to Healthdirect staff.

“To go and interview these people, to make sure that they have, indeed, recovered. That they meet the criteria for release from isolation,” he said.

“I understand that it has gone to Healthdirect to be allocated and then the data has now come back, so I don’t think they (previously active cases) were all called yesterday but it’s been over the last couple of days.”

Later on Thursday, Victoria’s Department of Health and Human Services said the number of active cases had “declined significantly today to account for cases cleared over the past five days, supported by additional capacity”.

“This coincides with a high number of cases in the past two to three weeks who are starting to recover,” it said in a statement.

“The public health team anticipate that if the current trend of slower growth in new cases continues, then the active case number will continue to decline rapidly.”

On August 12, the number of active cases dropped for the first time since mid-June.

The total hovered around 7800 for a few days before dropping to 7474 on August 17 then 7274 on August 18.

This was despite the state recording between 212 and 373 new cases each day over the last week.

The active case total was last below 5000 on July 29 – four days before stage four lockdown restrictions began in metropolitan Melbourne.

Prof Cheng said people who do not show symptoms for 10 days are cleared from isolation.

“There’s very good evidence, and in line with international guidance, for most people that don’t have any complicating factors, it’s 10 days and three days after the resolution of their symptoms – they don’t need additional swabs,” Prof Cheng said.

“For those that have impaired immune systems, any sort of risk factors, if they’re still in hospital for example, then we require that they have negative swabs before they leave.”

Asked why everyone isn’t swabbed to be cleared from isolation, Prof Cheng replied: “It’s not necessary.”

“People that don’t have severe disease actually become less infective fairly quickly,” he said.

“In Taiwan, there was a study where they followed up contacts of people. After about six days, there were no cases that resulted from contact, after about six or seven days. There’s obviously a bit of a safety margin built into that, and we do need to make sure that their symptoms have resolved.”

He said the national guidelines state asymptomatic people can be released 10 days after they test positive.

“That’s deemed to be the start of their illness,” Prof Cheng said.

He stressed that 14-day quarantine is for people exposed to COVID-19 who are at risk, “and that’s to do with how long it takes to become unwell”, whereas isolation is 10 days for positive cases and three days after their illness resolves.

“What it can mean is that people that become unwell actually are released before people who aren’t unwell but that’s just a property of the disease,” he said.

The number of mystery cases also dropped on Thursday.

Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews said there are 3874 cases with an unknown source.

“That’s 33 that have been closed out,” he said.

“That coronavirus detective work has closed those cases out since yesterday.”

Prof Cheng said the figure of 240 new cases announced on Thursday was “still too high”.

“They are coming down, they’re going in the right direction,” he said.

“We’re not looking for single-day figures, but a trend over time, and that trend is coming down.”

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2020-08-20 07:37:06Z
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