Melbourne braces for new lockdown
Health officials have warned the results of testing overnight will be crucial to any decision about imposing another strict lockdown.
Melbourne was on the brink of a strict lockdown on Wednesday after the number of Covid-19 cases linked to a cluster in the city’s north hit 15 and the number of exposure sites passed 60.
Health officials have warned the results of testing overnight will be crucial to any decision about imposing restrictions, with the Andrews government holding crisis talks late into the evening to contemplate a lockdown.
“I cannot rule out taking some further action,” Acting Premier James Merlino said earlier on Wednesday. “The next 24 hours are going to be critical.”
Possible exposure sites are now spread from Cohuna, in northern Victoria, to Bendigo and across suburban Melbourne.
But testing numbers remain high — more than 26,180 tests were processed in the 24 hours to Wednesday, compared with 14,892 the previous day — and vaccinations are expected to increase as well.
Following a conversation between Mr Merlino and Scott Morrison on Wednesday, the commonwealth announced it would provide Victoria with an extra 130,000 vaccines, including 40,000 doses this week and another 15,000 each week for the next six weeks.
Federal Health Minister Greg Hunt said residents of all 16 aged-care facilities in the Whittlesea local government area, where the Covid-19 cluster is located, were fully vaccinated. However, 29 Victorian aged-care facilities had not received any vaccines, he said.
The majority of the 820 people who lost their lives to the pandemic in Victoria last year were residents of commonwealth-regulated aged-care facilities.
The deteriorating situation — with new exposure sites including the MCG, Marvel Stadium and three bars near Melbourne’s busy Chapel Street precinct — came as South Australia’s health department revealed that an open door in a hotel quarantine facility was to blame for transmitting Covid-19 to a man who subsequently arrived in Victoria.
The man, in his 30s, returned from overseas to Adelaide and travelled to Melbourne’s northern suburb of Wollert more than three weeks ago. Genomic sequencing has linked the Wollert man’s Indian B. 1.617 strain of the virus to the subsequent cluster, but it remains unclear how it was passed to the cluster’s index case, who is believed to have been infectious in the community for up to 10 days before he presented for testing on Monday.
Victorian Health Department officials said the cases revealed on Wednesday morning included those of a man and two women in their 60s, a man in his 50s, two women in their 30s, and two men and two women in their 20s. As of Wednesday morning, the department had identified 251 primary close contacts related to exposure sites, of whom 140 had negative test results.
This included 106 contacts linked to the Stratton Finance exposure site in Port Melbourne.
Revealing six new cases on Wednesday in addition to five on Tuesday and four when the cluster emerged on Monday, Mr Merlino said authorities were reassured that the new cases were linked but alarmed by the number and nature of new exposure sites.
“We’ll keep working through the interviews and further information, and there’ll be meetings over the course of the day, but I want to be upfront with everyone this morning: I cannot rule out taking further action, but we will update people as soon as we know,” the Acting Premier said.
From Tuesday evening, Victorians have been required to wear masks indoors, restrict private indoor gatherings to no more than five people, with a limit of 30 people outdoors.
Victoria’s chief health officer, Brett Sutton, said potential exposures dating back weeks presented a challenge for the state’s contact tracers.
“There’s been a lot of chasing to be done, effectively because we have had those individuals out in the community for some days in the past, so there are potential exposures there that relate to some days ago and are yet to potentially play out with new cases,” he said.
In February, the government declared a five-day lockdown as a Holiday Inn cluster reached 13 cases a week after the virus escaped a quarantine hotel.
South Australia closed its borders to greater Melbourne from 6pm on Wednesday, as NSW and Queensland advised people from their states to avoid non-urgent travel to the city, and Victorian politicians were urged by federal parliament’s presiding officers to remain in Canberra this weekend ahead of next week’s sitting.
In NSW, health authorities on Wednesday night were urgently contacting people from a sporting club in Tooleybuc, in the state’s western Riverina region.
NSW Health believes some of those people had attended the Cohuna Football Netball Club — in Victoria — on May 22.
The AFL has also made changes to its schedule, scrapping a Hawthorn-Gold Coast game in Darwin on Saturday night.
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