Summary
- A hotel in Melbourne housing COVID-positive patients is being evacuated today, after a sprinkler system caused damage to four floors. Thirty-one residents at the Holiday Inn on Flinders Lane are being transferred to the Pullman Hotel, while repairs for water damage to four floors of the Holiday Inn are completed.
- Two new locally acquired COVID-19 cases have been confirmed in Victoria, both of them linked with the Holiday Inn Melbourne Airport outbreak. There were also two new cases among returned travellers in hotel quarantine.
- The World Health Organisation has listed AstraZeneca and Oxford University’s COVID-19 vaccine for emergency use.
- A federal expansion of hotel quarantine could be delayed until April as cyclone season disrupts plans for the Howard Springs camp in the Northern Territory.
- The number of confirmed COVID-19 cases worldwide has passed 109 million, and there have been more than 2.4 million deaths from the virus, Johns Hopkins University data shows.
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Graph: How Victoria’s daily testing numbers are tracking
The headline number in Victoria’s health department’s daily COVID-19 updates is always the number of new locally acquired cases, but the daily testing numbers are important too.
The daily testing numbers give a sense of how widespread testing for the virus has been over the past 24 hours, which helps to give assurance that potential cases out in the community aren’t slipping through the net.
Here is a graph showing daily testing numbers in Victoria. As you can see, testing numbers have been pretty robust in the days since the Holiday Inn outbreak was identified, with more than 20,000 each day carried out.
That big peak in testing - of more than 35,000 daily tests - dates back to the start of January, in the days that followed the Black Rock restaurant outbreak.
Victoria records two new local cases
Victoria has recorded two new locally acquired COVID-19 cases, and both of them are linked with the Holiday Inn outbreak.
There were also two new cases confirmed among returned travellers in hotel quarantine, bringing the total number of new cases on Tuesday to four.
There are currently 25 active cases in Victoria, and a total of 23,950 test results were processed yesterday.
Melbourne quarantine hotel residents transferred to another hotel due to water damage
By Kate Lahey
A hotel in Melbourne housing COVID-positive patients is being evacuated today, after a sprinkler system caused damage to four floors.
Thirty-one residents at the Holiday Inn on Flinders Lane are being transferred to the Pullman Hotel, while repairs for water damage are completed.
A COVID-19 Quarantine Victoria (CQV) spokesperson said the Pullman Albert Park Hotel was assessed by ventilation experts and determined as the most suitable hotel within CQV’s current hotel stock to accommodate symptomatic and positive residents.
Fire trucks were called to the Holiday Inn on Saturday. It was a false alarm - there was no fire and sprinklers caused water damage to four floors. Credit:Chris Hopkins
“Strict infection prevention and control (IPC) measures will be followed during the transfer to ensure the health and safety of residents, staff and the community,” a statement from the spokesperson said.
“Holiday Inn Melbourne on Flinders staff will be transferred to the Pullman Albert Park along with the 31 residents, where they will continue to provide support to residents.”
A sprinkler system was activated on the fourth floor on Saturday, although there was no fire, resulting in water damage to four of the eight floors of the hotel, according to CQV.
The Pullman Albert Park Hotel was previously used to quarantine Australian Open participants and was intended to be brought online shortly as additional quarantine capacity.
NSW Premier to receive vaccination briefing today
By Josh Dye
NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian says she will be briefed today on the state’s vaccination plan, with hotel quarantine workers first in line to have the choice to receive a vaccine.
“We know the greatest risk at this stage is a leakage from the quarantine system,” she said.
“At this stage given there is zero community transmission, it stands to reason that those who work in the quarantine system who are directly exposed themselves… is really where our focus will be.”
NSW Premier Gladys BerejiklianCredit:James Brickwood
This will include nurses, police officers, security guards and hotel staff.
Meanwhile, Ms Berejiklian said she has “given up hope” of borders remaining open, after Western Australia announced people from NSW can now travel to the state without quarantining on arrival.
“We can’t always control what other premiers do but we can control what we do,” she said.
COVID-19 exposure sites in Melbourne
Here is the current list of COVID-19 exposure sites in Melbourne.
These are places that were visited in recent days by someone who later tested positive for the virus. Health authorities are urging anyone who has been to any of these locations within the exposure periods to get tested.
You can also view this information as a map:
There have not been any new sites added to the list so far today, but if any high-risk locations are announced I will post them in the blog.
There were three locations added to the list yesterday, although all three sites are at Broadmeadows Central Shopping Centre in Braoadmeadows, in Melbourne’s north. The west side of the complex has been added as an exposure site, along with the BonBon Bakery and Sacca’s Fruit World in the centre.
Pfizer Australia medical director on challenges of storing and transporting the company’s vaccine
Pfizer Australia’s medical director Krishan Thiru has said the company’s vaccine will be delivered successfully, despite the sub-zero temperatures in which the vaccine vials have to be stored and transported.
He appeared on Nine’s Today a short time ago and fielded some questions about the vaccine’s arrival in Australia, particularly about whether the vaccine’s requirement to be stored in minus-70 degree temperatures would cause problems.
He replied Pfizer used specially designed thermal shippers to transport its vaccine vials.
“Our company has rich heritage in cold-chain vaccine storage and distribution,” he said. “So far have a 99.9 per cent success rate from delivering the vaccines from the factory door to where they’re used with quality and integrity intact.”
He said it was too early to gauge whether the vaccine was stopping transmission of the virus in the UK, since the current proportion of the population vaccinated (about 15-20 per cent) was not high enough to make that call.
Watch live: Press conference with NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian
An early-morning press conference with NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian, Deputy Premier John Barilaro and state Education Minister Sarah Mitchell is about to get under way.
The Premier will be making an education-related announcement, but it is likely the topic of COVID-19 will come up during question time.
Watch it live below:
Quarantine expansion faces cyclone delay to April
By David Crowe
A federal expansion of hotel quarantine could be delayed until April as cyclone season disrupts plans for a key facility in the Northern Territory at the same time as the Victorian government calls for cuts to the system in the major cities.
While the former mining camp in Howard Springs near Darwin already has 850 places for international arrivals, the NT government believes it should not add more until the region comes out of cyclone season in about two months.
Prime Minister Scott Morrison has dismissed arguments for a federal takeover of the hotel quarantine system, declaring “we’re not going to be running it” and insisting states are doing a good job.
Labor deputy leader Richard Marles.Credit:Alex Ellinghausen
But federal Labor is demanding a federal intervention to take the load off the states, arguing the international border is a federal responsibility.
“The federal government needs to explain what its plan is to bring stranded Australians home and what its plan is to deal with the quarantine aspects of that,” Labor deputy leader Richard Marles said on Monday.
Please Explain: A look at CSL and the making of the COVID vaccine
While we’re on the topic of the Oxford Astra-Zeneca vaccine (which has been given emergency approval by the World Health Organisation), it’s worth checking out yesterday’s episode of Please Explain.
In it, science reporter Liam Mannix talks with national editor Tory Maguire about the CSL facility in Melbourne, which is where Australia’s vials of the Astra-Zeneca vaccine are being manufactured.
At a press conference yesterday, Health Minister Greg Hunt said the first vials of the vaccine were being produced at the facility, and Chief Medical Officer Paul Kelly said there would likely be an announcement in the coming days on whether the vaccine had been granted TGA approval.
You can listen to the podcast here:
WHO approves Oxford-AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccine for emergency use
The World Health Organisation has listed AstraZeneca and Oxford University’s COVID-19 vaccine for emergency use, widening access to the relatively inexpensive shot in the developing world.
“We now have all the pieces in place for the rapid distribution of vaccines. But we still need to scale up production,” Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, WHO Director-General, told a news briefing on Monday (Tuesday AEDT).
The AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccine.Credit:AP
The listing by the UN health agency comes days after a WHO panel provided interim recommendations on the vaccine, saying two doses with an interval of around 8 to 12 weeks must be given to all adults, and can be used in countries with the South African variant of the coronavirus as well.
The WHO’s review found that the AstraZeneca vaccine met the “must-have” criteria for safety, and its efficacy benefits outweighed its risks.
The Oxford-AstraZeneca shot has been hailed because it is cheaper and easier to distribute than some rivals, including Pfizer-BioNTech’s , which was listed for emergency use by the WHO late in December.
Reuters
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2021-02-15 21:33:00Z
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