ADF to steamroll bungled vaccine rollout as Victoria records one new local Covid case
At least a thousand Victorians have escaped without a fine after a two-week police blitz on mask compliance on public transport.
Victoria
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At least a thousand Victorians have escaped with just a warning after being caught without a mask on public transport.
The two-week sting by police resulted in almost 50 fines being issued to travellers who refused to comply with the rule to wear a mask on trains, trams and buses.
The mask rule on public transport has been a constant feature since the start of Victoria’s tough three-month lockdown from July to October last year.
Those who fail to wear a mask face a $200 fine.
Victoria Police announced a crackdown on mask compliance last month after a noticeable decline in commuters adhering to the rule during the state’s run of 86 straight days without a locally acquired Covid-19 case.
The number of passengers on public transport wearing masks slipped to about 50 per cent in early May, down from 77 per cent in March.
Transit Division Superintendent Andrew Humberstone said mask compliance increased to about 95 per cent during the operation.
“There were just under 50 fines issued during the course of this operation, while over 1100 people were given a formal warning and provided with a mask to wear,” he told NCA NewsWire.
“The vast majority of public transport users were highly compliant.
“Initially, Operation Bane was established in response to growing community concern around diminishing mask compliance on public transport and it quickly became even more crucial to ensure everyone was wearing a mask as we battled another coronavirus outbreak in the state and restrictions tightened.”
Superintendent Humberstone said police and protective service officers would continue to have a presence across the public transport network even though the operation had concluded.
The operation ran from May 24 to June 6 and saw police adopt an educative approach.
Those without a face mask were offered one and people who rejected it and deliberately failed to comply with the chief health officer’s directions were slapped with a $200 fine.
Police said the fourth state lockdown announced on May 28 – in the middle of the operation – resulted in a significant decrease of commuter traffic on public transport.
Victorians are still required to wear a mask indoors, including public transport, and outside where social distancing can’t be maintained.
ADF TO STEAMROLL BUNGLED VACCINE ROLLOUT
The Australian Defence Force is being called in to help the nation’s sluggish vaccine rollout, as the number of doses each state can expect to receive by year’s end is finally revealed.
An emergency national cabinet meeting was held this morning as tensions between the states and the federal government flare over a lack of vaccine supply.
Leaders are understood to have expressed support at the decision to bring in the Australian Defence Force to help speed up the rollout.
States and territories also called on the Commonwealth to immediately get more GPs and pharmacists involved in the program in a bid to deliver more jabs when supply is eventually ramped up.
Covid-19 Taskforce Commander Lieutenant General John Frewen said the nation’s stockpile of the Pfizer vaccine, now preferred for people aged between 50 and 59, needed to be carefully managed for at least another month, until more arrived from overseas.
“We are still in a resource-constrained environment we need to carefully manage. But on current forecasts, we are looking forward to ramp up availability of Pfizer through August into September and into October,” he said.
He expected better supplies flows from then, when authorities would “be able to allocate that more freely”.
“But for now, we have to manage the resources that we’ve got against the highest priorities we’ve got,” he said.
NSW will receive an extra 50,000 Pfizer doses as it grapples with a Bondi outbreak, a similar response to Victoria’s latest outbreak.
General Frewen said he told states exactly how many doses they could expect to see by the end of the year.
“What I did do was to issue the planning parameters of the likely lowest allocations and highest allocations the states and territories can expect right out to the end of the year,” he said.
“Previously they hadn’t had that information available. I committed to them to get that detail
It comes hours after Mr Merlino blasted the national rollout as a “mess” and demanded the federal government increase supply.
The Commonwealth has increased the number of doses allocated to Victoria from 71,370 per week in June to 83,070 in July, while an additional 200,000 will be sent to GPs across the state.
“When you hear how Australia is going compared with the rest of the world, we are falling so far behind it’s not funny,” Mr Merlino told reporters on Monday.
“What we need to see out of national cabinet today, and for the rest of the year, is a sense of urgency and acknowledgment that this is a race.”
Mr Merlino welcomed the appointment of Lieutenant General John Frewen to head the national Covid-19 taskforce. General Frewen has been tasked with recalibrating the increasingly Pfizer-dependent rollout.
“God knows we need someone to sort out the mess in Canberra,” he said.
“We need people to get vaccinated. The higher the proportion of your population that is vaccinated, the better options there are for public health advice in terms of how we get through this pandemic.”
Mr Morrison, who was undergoing quarantine in Canberra after returning from a trip to the G7, claimed a “lot of progress is being made”, with more than 60 per cent of people aged over 70 having received their first dose.
Additional Pfizer doses will be sent to the states and territories in July, and Mr Morrison insisted “close work” would continue as Australia adapted to the new advice.
“There’s no need for argy bargy about it. We’ll just get on work together, which is what I think people expect state and commonwealth governments to do,” he told 2GB Radio on Monday.
It comes as the state recorded one new local case of Covid, along with a spike of eight new infections in hotel quarantine.
The new locally acquired infection is a resident of the Kings Park apartment complex in Southbank, who has been quarantining throughout their infectious period.
But there was a dip in testing, with just over 16,290 swabs received on Sunday.
There is now fewer than 1000 close contacts associated with Melbourne’s Covid-19 clusters.
Victoria’s Covid-19 commander Jeroen Weimar confirmed just 28 active cases remain across Melbourne’s current clusters.
More than 450 primary close contacts are still associated with the Kings Park apartment complex cluster in Southbank.
Just 45 close contacts are linked to the initial City of Whittlesea outbreak; 90 in Port Melbourne and 33 in West Melbourne.
“We’ve come a long way over the past four weeks,” Mr Weimar said.
“We have some more work to do on closing out the remainder of the outbreaks (but) as we’ve seen from our interstate colleagues we’re never completely out of the woods.”
More than 850,000 tests have been carried out in the past five weeks.
190,000 organisations have registered to use Service Victoria’s QR code system, with more than 29 million check ins recorded in the past week – an increase of eight million a week earlier.
On vaccines, Mr Weimar said he supported an education campaign to help boost public confidence around the rollout.
“We know the demand is there … but as we go forward, we’ll need to continue to inform and guide Australians around what the options are,” he said.
It comes as the state government eagerly await more vaccine certainty.
“The more we can get, the quicker we can get,” Mr Weimar said.
“We’re all frustrated that there’s not more vaccination around.”
On footy crowds, Mr Weimar said any restriction changes was a matter for Chief Health Officer Brett Sutton.
“We’ll have to wait and see what comes up to meet us in the next few days,” he said.
Acting Premier James Merlino said he wanted to see a “sense of urgency” from his federal counterparts ahead of National Cabinet on Monday morning.
Briefing the media ahead of the 10am meeting, Mr Merlino said the trouble plagued vaccine rollout would be at the top of his to-do list.
He said he wanted acknowledgment from the Commonwealth that the rollout was a “race”.
“We want to see a sense of urgency,” Mr Merlino said. “We are well behind where we need to be.
“This is a race. We simply have not received enough supply of the vaccine.
“This is the one job the Commonwealth has — procure and supply vaccines.”
When asked if the state government had considered approaching Pfizer directly to obtain more doses, Mr Merlino said: “Believe me, if we could, we would … we would do it in a heartbeat.”
Meanwhile, Mr Merlino said there was “no advice” to suggest pausing international flights, after eight cases were detected in hotel quarantine overnight.
INTERSTATE TRAVEL STILL ON HOLD
School holiday trips interstate remain in limbo despite Victoria recording only one new local coronavirus case at the weekend.
It comes as Victoria has declared another four Sydney suburbs “orange zones” as the Bondi coronavirus cluster grows.
Anyone entering Victoria from Bayside, Canada Bay, Inner West or Randwick must now obtain an orange zone permit, and is required to get tested and isolate until they receive a negative result.
The City of Sydney, Waverley and Woollara municipalities areas also remain orange zones, and chief health officer Brett Sutton advises against non-essential travel.
With the school term to end this Friday, Melburnians will be forced to wait and see if winter escapes to the Sunshine state will be granted — but Queensland has been holding firm on its hotspot declaration.
No new local cases were recorded in Victoria on Sunday.
Queensland closed its border to Victoria on May 28 following the latest outbreak and last week extended the hotspot declaration for residents of Greater Melbourne.
Regional Victorians are currently able to travel to Queensland but must complete a travel declaration.
A spokesman for Queensland Health said they would continue to monitor the situation in Victoria and review border rules in line with Victoria’s easing of restrictions – the next of which is expected to be announced on Thursday.
It comes as a Queensland woman returned a positive test after leaving hotel quarantine.
Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk announced the new local case on Sunday but said Queenslanders should “not be alarmed”.
Mr Merlino said restrictions on interstate visitors were a matter for each state. “My hope and my expectation and my experience are that states and territories reflect the situation on the ground,” he said on Sunday.
Mr Merlino said that with the improving situation in Victoria, he expected restrictions for Melburnians would be relaxed in other states.
Meanwhile, Australian Tourism Industry Council boss Simon Westaway said it was critical that state borders remained open.
“One would hope that by the time school holidays are in full swing that we do see seamless travel between all of our major states, but also to enable Victorians to travel across borders,” Mr Westaway said.
“Hard borders, ultimately, are not the solution. It obviously has a significant effect on the local tourism industry.”
Mr Westaway said the sector made most of its money during the school holidays.
Closer to home, the requirement for Melburnians to get tested before hitting the ski slopes remained the “common sense” approach, Mr Merlino said.
“If you want to go to the Alpine resorts, if you want to go to the snow, just get tested, show you’ve got a negative result and then you can hit the mountain,” Mr Merlino said.
Health officials on Sunday revealed they were investigating two returned travellers who recorded positive Covid-19 test results after leaving hotel quarantine.
Health Minister Martin Foley said the pair produced conflicting results on different testing platforms, suggesting they had previously been infected before arriving in Australia and were “historical infections”.
SYDNEY CLUSTER GROWS
Mass testing orders are being issued to residents in Sydney’s eastern suburbs as health authorities race to track down anyone who may have been exposed to the highly-infectious Delta variant — the same strain in Melbourne’s latest outbreak.
The Bondi Covid-19 cluster has grown to nine people, including two who visited the Westfield shopping centre at Bondi Junction, leaving health officials to comb through CCTV to try and catch any incidental interactions where the virus may have spread.
The Delta strain is thought to be about 60 per cent more transmissible than the Alpha variant. Overseas, young people have increasingly reported symptoms with the strain, raising concerns for Australia’s largely unvaccinated cohort of under 50s.
A lack of CCTV showing exactly when the infectious carriers entered the Bondi Junction Westfield and no QR codes at the entrance of the shopping centre has further hampered tracing efforts.
Originally published as ADF to steamroll bungled vaccine rollout as Victoria records one new local Covid case
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