Code brown to be lifted at Victorian hospitals on Monday

The statewide code brown called at Victorian hospitals when the healthcare system was buckling under the Omicron wave will end at noon on Monday following a steady drop in coronavirus admissions.

Health Minister Martin Foley said 1000 new staff had been hired to help administer COVID-19 vaccines to replace health workers from their vaccination duties and allow them to return to their normal jobs in the state’s health system.

Public hospitals in regional Victoria will also be able to resume all category two elective surgery.

The Peter MacCallum Cancer Centre and The Royal Victorian Eye and Ear Hospital will also resume all category two elective surgeries from Monday, Mr Foley said, while all other public hospitals in metropolitan Melbourne remain restricted to emergency and urgent elective surgery.

However, Mr Foley said a further easing of restrictions would be considered next week if COVID-19 hospital admissions continued to fall.

He said the new staff would include health students and retired nurses to help administer vaccines to people aged over 18.

“Having the hundreds of extra nurses able to return ... to our health system and other health professionals is a good thing,” Mr Foley said. “And that is therefore allowing us ... to lift the code brown pandemic alert as of this coming Monday.

“We indicated at the time when this was put in place in January that it would be in place for four to six weeks,” he said.

“Next week is the fourth week, and we’re confident that, while [it’s] still going to be very, very busy, we are in a position to safely lift the code brown alert.”

Quarantine hotels across the state will also cease operating as isolation facilities by the end of next month, with the state’s purpose-built quarantine hub now near completion.

The $200 million facility will become operational later this month and begin housing unvaccinated travellers as well as people unable to safely isolate at home.

Aerial image of the Mickleham quarantine facility under construction.Credit: Joe Armao

Located in Mickleham, the hub will also be used as emergency accommodation in the event of natural disasters, such as bushfires, and be equipped to deal with future pandemics.

The first 250 beds at the facility will open in late February with operations scaling up through March and April. About 500 staff are currently being trained on-site.

Several hotels used to treat and care for COVID-19 patients before they are discharged from hospital will also cease operating for that purpose in late February, due to dropping infection numbers in the state.

In a statement announcing the news on Friday afternoon, Police Minister Lisa Neville said the new quarantine hub would ensure Victoria had the resources to deal with current and future pandemics.

“We have always known hotels were built for tourists, not quarantine, so it’s more than appropriate to be ending our hotel program now that operations are about to kick off at the purpose-built Victorian Quarantine Hub,” she said.

“The lessons learned in hotel quarantine won’t go to waste, with hundreds of existing hotel staff transitioning over to the hub in the coming weeks.”

Victorian Police Minister Lisa Neville. Credit: Penny Stephens

More than 70,000 residents have transited through Victoria’s quarantine system since December 2020.

The announcement comes after Victoria recorded 8521 new COVID-19 cases and 13 deaths on Friday and after Australian health officials announced people would need a third coronavirus vaccine dose to be considered up to date.

There are now 553 people in hospital with the virus in Victoria, with 23 on ventilators and 82 in intensive care.

Of the new cases reported across the state, 3162 were confirmed by PCR tests, while 5359 were self-reported from rapid antigen tests. More than 22,000 PCR tests results were returned on Thursday.

Victoria now has 55,617 active cases.

In its updated advice on Thursday night, Australian Technical Advisory Group on Immunisation (ATAGI) recommended that everyone aged 16 and over get a booster three months after their primary two-dose course to maintain protection against COVID-19.

If it has been longer than six months since a person has received two doses, and they have not had a booster, they would no longer be considered “up to date” and instead would become “overdue”. It is a step away from stricter messaging around the need to be “fully vaccinated”.

Ahead of Australia’s border reopening on February 21, the federal government stated the new ATAGI definition would not apply to international travellers, with that cohort needing two doses of an approved vaccine to enter the country.

In Victoria, Premier Daniel Andrews said his government would try “to the maximum extent possible to have consistent rules”, but there might be discrepancies depending on how long a visitor was in Australia.

“That will probably mean that they won’t be perfect rules because we’ll all have to compromise a little bit,” he said.

“In some circumstances, people who are here a short term, for instance, [there] might be different rules [than] for people who are here longer term.”

National cabinet agreed in its Thursday meeting that there would be no national mandates for three doses except for aged care workers, but states and territories are open to decide any other local requirements.

The Victorian government pushed back the deadline for key workers to receive their third dose of a COVID-19 vaccine by a month, just days before the mandate was due to come into effect across the state.

Victorians working in healthcare, aged care, disability support, emergency services, corrections, quarantine accommodation and food distribution who became eligible to receive a third dose by January 12, will now have until March 12 to get their shot before they risk being barred from their workplace.

About 93 per cent of Victorians aged over 12 have received two doses of a COVID-19 vaccine, and 49 per cent of those aged over 18 have received a booster dose. There were 14,650 inoculations administered at state-run sites on Thursday.

With Rachel Clun, Marta Pascual Juanola and Cassandra Morgan