One new locally acquired case confirmed in Victoria
One new locally acquired COVID-19 case has been confirmed in Victoria, the state’s health department has confirmed.
There was also one case in an overseas traveller in hotel quarantine, bringing the total number of new cases confirmed on Monday morning to two.
There are currently 21 active cases in Victoria.
A total of 25,144 test results were received yesterday, the highest single-day total for more than a month.
There have not been any further details announced on Monday’s sole locally acquired case at this stage and whether it has been linked with the Holiday Inn cluster.
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Current vaccine rollout pace insufficient to vaccinate enough healthcare workers: AMA
By Marissa Calligeros
Victoria and other states are set to receive 11,000 coronavirus vaccine doses for seven to eight weeks as the rollout begins later this month, the Australian Medical Association’s Julian Rait says.
But he told ABC Radio that’s insufficient to vaccinate the tens of thousands of frontline healthcare workers.
Associate Professor Rait also said Victorian hospitals will likely have to ration their coronavirus vaccines as the federal government reserves supplies for private aged care residents.
Australian Medical Association Victoria president Julian Rait.Credit:Justin McManus
“There are going to be two priority groups, those who work in quarantine and those who work in public aged care. They’re usually employed by health networks and the health networks themselves will probably vaccinate the aged care residents and staff in public aged care with their allocation.
“That will potentially leave healthcare workers and others on the front line exposed,” he said.
One new locally acquired case confirmed in Victoria
One new locally acquired COVID-19 case has been confirmed in Victoria, the state’s health department has confirmed.
There was also one case in an overseas traveller in hotel quarantine, bringing the total number of new cases confirmed on Monday morning to two.
There are currently 21 active cases in Victoria.
A total of 25,144 test results were received yesterday, the highest single-day total for more than a month.
There have not been any further details announced on Monday’s sole locally acquired case at this stage and whether it has been linked with the Holiday Inn cluster.
Waiting for Victoria’s daily case numbers
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 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.
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2021-02-14 22:27:00Z
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