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Waiting for Victoria’s
It looks like it’s going to be one of those mornings where many Victorians will be constantly refreshing Twitter in the hope the daily case numbers will appear:
I’ll post the numbers in the blog as soon as they are published. If the past few days are anything to go by, it might take until about 9.30am for the Department of Health update to go out.
Coburg function not looking like super-spreader event, epidemiologist says
By Marissa Calligeros
An epidemiologist says it appears a Melbourne family function linked to the Holiday Inn hotel quarantine outbreak may not be a super-spreader event.
A COVID-19 infected Holiday Inn hotel quarantine worker attended the private family function on Sydney Road in Coburg on February 6.
A three-year-old child, a woman in her 50s and a Point Cook man in his 30s contracted the virus at the function. The child’s mother is also a suspected case and authorities are reviewing her test results.
The function was not on the radar of contact tracers for several days because the hotel worker initially returned an “exceptionally rare” false-negative test result on February 7. The venue was not listed as an exposure site until late on February 12 – two days after the hotel quarantine worker eventually tested positive.
While the function is cause for concern, Burnet Institute epidemiologist Professor Michael Toole, said the situation was “looking good”.
“Those two people at the Coburg site were infected about a week ago, or were exposed a week ago. We haven’t had any other cases outside of close contacts, so that’s looking good,” he told Melbourne radio station 3AW.
“It looks like there hasn’t been extensive spread here.“
Professor Toole supports Victoria’s hard, five-day lockdown.
“It was shown in Brisbane and Perth that this approach does work,” he said.
Australia’s first doses of the Pfizer vaccine to arrive later this week
There have been a few posts in the blog so far this morning on the vaccination progress of some countries and how the Pfizer vaccine has been approved in Japan. But what about Australia?
Health Minister Greg Hunt said on Sunday that 80,000 doses of the Pfizer vaccine were due to arrive in Australia sometime this week. The exact date has not yet been announced.
Those vaccine doses will be checked upon arrival by the Therapeutic Goods Administration before being distributed to high-risk people and some essential workers.
‘Every state should learn from NSW’: Treasurer
By Josh Dye
Federal Treasurer Josh Frydenberg has said the timing for Victoria’s latest lockdown was “devastating” for businesses.
“Small businesses like restaurants were expecting a bumper weekend with Valentine’s Day, Chinese New Year and people going to the tennis,” he told the Today show.
“I spoke to one restauranteur that it cost him $50,000 in food (which he had to throw out) and tens of thousands of dollars in wages because he had chefs preparing food for the weekend.“
“It has dented confidence as well.“
Treasurer Josh Frydenberg.Credit:Alex Ellinghausen
Mr Frydenberg said “every state should learn from NSW”.
“It comes down to contact testing, contact tracing, having a very good system in place and no doubt Victoria has made improvements after the devastating second wave, but NSW is the gold standard because they haven’t had a [second] statewide lockdown.“
He said the JobKeeper wage subsidy “needs to end” on March 31.
“Every dollar we spend on this program is a borrowed dollar,” he said.
Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine gets approval in Japan
Japan issued its first approval for a vaccine against the coronavirus Sunday, saying it would use the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine to begin inoculating frontline health care workers this week.
Officials plan to first vaccinate a select group of health care workers who will then administer the shots to other medical professionals.
The vaccine will be rolled out to the elderly and high-risk populations by late spring, according to plans published by the health ministry.
But Japan is unlikely to have its entire population vaccinated before it hosts the Olympic Games this summer, and it has said athletes and other attendees will not be required to be vaccinated beforehand.
New York Times
Victoria’s Liberal opposition says Andrews needs to ‘go to NSW and get help’ on quarantine
By Marissa Calligeros
There are renewed calls for quarantine facilities to be in regional areas in Victoria, with Professor Mike Toole - an epidemiologist at the Burnet Institute - suggesting Avalon, Bendigo and Ballarat as possible alternatives.
Victoria has paused all international arrivals amid the Holiday Inn outbreak which has sparked the state’s five-day, hard lockdown.
But Victoria’s shadow health minister Georgie Crozier says NSW has shown that quarantine facilities can work in the CBD.
“Daniel Andrews has to admit he’s got it wrong and he needs to go to NSW and get help,” Ms Crozier told Melbourne station 3AW this morning.
“They’re doing it right, they’ve been able to manage this... we have not, we have failed time and time again.”
‘Quick out of the blocks’: Qld Health pounces on Melbourne visitors
By Stuart Layt and Matt Dennien
Many of the 1500 people linked to the current Melbourne cluster who travelled to Queensland have now left the state, Queensland Health has confirmed.
Queensland Health confirmed on Saturday that all of the approximately 1500 people connected to exposure sites at Melbourne Airport before travelling into the state have now been contacted and told to get tested and quarantine in their own residences for 14 days.
Three travellers from Greater Melbourne were turned around at Gold Coast Airport on the weekend.Credit:Shutterstock
A Queensland Health spokeswoman confirmed on Sunday that “a lot” of the travellers had already left Queensland as they were not residents, although she couldn’t confirm the exact number.
Extra tracers were brought in to help contact the cohort as soon as possible, and Queensland Treasurer Cameron Dick said they had done an excellent job in locating all of those involved in the current situation.
‘Clearly there’s communication problems’: AMA takes aim at Victoria’s failing quarantine system
By Marissa Calligeros
The Australian Medical Association has taken aim at Victoria’s hotel quarantine system, which Premier Daniel Andrews recently lauded as the best in the country.
“It is really frustrating that some of the clinical expertise and the hundreds of hours that a multidisciplinary team has put in, in terms of healthcare worker infection prevention, to come up with some excellent recommendations ... have not been listened to and have not been implemented,” the AMA’s Sarah Whitelaw told Nine’s Today show a short time ago.
“Clearly there’s communication problems between the Department of Health and COVID Quarantine Victoria which needs to be fixed before we go forward,” Dr Whitelaw said.
“We made a lot of improvements in Victoria ... [but] we’re not clearly not ready to handle the risk that quarantine poses under the current system. We’ve got some improvements to make.“
Victoria has paused all international arrivals amid the Holiday Inn outbreak which has sparked the snap, five-day lockdown.
When asked about the success of NSW’s quarantine program, which is accommodating more than 3000 returned travellers each week, Dr Whitelaw said “picking up another state’s model and copying it wholesale is probably not the complete answer”.
“At the moment Australia is vulnerable to any of the state’s quarantine programs. It doesn’t matter if your state is great. What matters is what happens all around Australia. And we’re all left vulnerable if one quarantine system fails,” she said.
Recap: Melbourne’s current list of COVID-19 exposure sites
Here is the current list of locations in Melbourne that are being classed as tier one exposure sites by the state’s health department. A tier one exposure site is somewhere that was visited for a considerable length of time by someone who later tested positive for the virus.
There have no been no new exposure sites added to the list today. These are the most recent ones, which were announced on Sunday:
- Yarra Trams No. 11 between 7.55am and 8.10am on February 11. (Start: D16 - Harbour Esplanade/Collins Street. Finish: William Street/Collins Street stop #3)
- Yarra Trams No. 58 between 8.10am and 8.25am on February 11. (Start: Bourke Street/William Street stop #5. Finish: Queen Victoria Market/Peel Street stop #9)
- Queen Victoria Market, between 8.25am and 10.10am on February 11. (Visited section 2 with fruit and vegetables, and used the section 2 female toilet.)
- Yarra Trams No. 58 between 9.40am and 9.55am on February 11 (Start: Queen Victoria Market/Peel Street stop #9. Finish: Bourke Street/William Street stop #5)
Calls to extend JobKeeper grow after Victoria’s lockdown
By Jennifer Duke
Victoria’s five-day lockdown and state border closures to limit the spread of coronavirus have renewed union and business group calls for the multibillion-dollar wage subsidy scheme JobKeeper to be extended beyond March despite federal government plans to wind back support.
More than 1.5 million workers were on JobKeeper at the end of 2020, new figures compiled by the Tax Office and released by the government show. But about 520,000 employers and 2.13 million staff who were receiving the subsidy when it was first introduced last March were no longer receiving the payments by the end of 2020.
But the present lockdown in Victoria, scheduled to end on Wednesday night, has fuelled debate about the future of both the wage subsidy scheme and the rate of the dole payment JobSeeker, formerly known as Newstart.
Australian Council of Trade Unions secretary Sally McManus said on ABC’s Sunday Insiders program that the Morrison government should retain the JobKeeper scheme “for as long as the pandemic is with us”.
“If you are in Melbourne at the moment, you would be pretty worried about JobKeeper being removed,” she said. “What we say is JobKeeper should be extended for those businesses that are still affected by the coronavirus ... We say that because that will save jobs.”
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2021-02-14 21:55:00Z
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