Crowded housing towers incubators for coronavirus

Melbourne’s locked down towers are prime incubators for COVID-19, driven by chronic overcrowding and shared facilities.

Melbourne’s lockdown towers are prime incubators for COVID-19, driven as much by chronic overcrowding as by the sites’ shared ­facilities.

The commonwealth’s acting chief health officer described Melbourne’s public housing towers as “vertical cruise ships” because they have a large concentration of people in a small area.

The public housing towers typically have nine apartments on each floor, and the units are small.

A large number of people living in the dwellings share lifts and laundries.

Victorian Public Tenants Association executive officer Mark Feenane said chronic overcrowding was an issue, with residents in the towers tending to come from larger families.

Extended family members often share the accommodation.

“What we tend to find with those high rises, because of where they are, are they get a lot of larger families and they’re crammed into two and three-bedroom apartments,” Mr Feenane said. “We’re talking about large families because that’s their culture by and large. You might find five or six kids and mum and dad living in a pretty crowded apartment. They live in cramped conditions.”

The Australian Institute of Health and Welfare reports that about 5 per cent of public housing tenants in Victoria live in overcrowded conditions, but Mr Feenane said that figure would be higher in Melbourne’s inner-city public housing towers.

“It’s really time for them to be replaced or to look at options other than high rise,” Mr Feenane said. “Maybe this COVID situation is giving an indication as to the way forward. We don’t want to cram too many people in to high-density living.”

Swinburne University senior research fellow Angela Spinney said people living in the high-rise towers were extremely vulner­able to infection because of the cramped living conditions. “We’ve always known that people living in overcrowded situations are far more likely to get diseases that are transmissible and that’s what happening in this case,” said Dr Spinney, a research fellow at the Centre for Urban Transitions.

“Although the housing departments when they allocate the apartments may not crowd people in, what happens is when poor people are allocated public housing, they’ll often have relatives or friends or family come and stay with them.

“This is particularly the case with people from refugee backgrounds who know other people in desperate situations who need to be housed as well; they’ll invite friends and family to live with them and that can lead to some very overcrowded situations.” Sixteen cases of COVID-19 were found on Monday in the nine tower blocks under lockdown, bringing the total number of infections in the blocks to 53.

Victorian Housing Minister Richard Wynne said approximately 400 tests were conducted in the towers yesterday, and 4 per cent of tests came back positive.

Health authorities are aiming to test all of the approximately 3000 residents of the nine tower blocks by Wednesday.

There have so far been no reports of any residents refusing to be tested.

The extraordinary decision to lock down the public housing towers completely, with residents not allowed to leave their apartments for any reason, follows examples throughout the world where high-density living has been responsible for disease spikes.

In Singapore, a second wave of COVID-19 occurred after the virus spread widely within migrant workers living in crowded conditions in dormitories on the outskirts of the city.