Coronavirus: Community motivated to beat this, says Brett Sutton

Authorities hold urgent meetings amid a cluster in the Casey LGA which has been linked to 34 cases.

Health professionals wait for patients at an empty drive-through COVID testing site in Dandenong in the City of Casey. Picture: Aaron Francis

Health authorities in Victoria have been holding urgent meetings with multicultural community leaders and local councils in Melbourne‘s outer southeast, amid a coronavirus cluster in the Casey local government area which has been linked to 34 cases since Sunday.

The cluster, which is understood to be linked to multiple households and have links to the local Afghan community, includes unknown source cases.

It comes as Melbourne’s number of unknown source cases increased from 81 to 83 on Thursday — an undesirable trend given the city needs to record fewer than five unknown source cases in the fortnight to October 26 to be released­ from stay-at-home and curfew restrictions under the ­Andrews government’s reopening roadmap.

It also occurs as case numbers elsewhere are decreasing, with Thursday’s 28 new cases the lowest daily increase since June 24.

Deputy Chief Health Officer Allen Cheng said the Department of Health and Human Services had held a community meeting on Wednesday night, with three new pop-up testing clinics established in the area in the suburbs of Clyde, Hallam and Noble Park.

Professor Cheng said a localised contact tracing approach, which had been deployed in reg­ional Victoria, was not yet up and running in suburban Melbourne, but some of the principles were being applied to the Casey cluster.

He did not have figures on how many tests had been done in Casey on Wednesday, amid reports­ of very few attendees at testing centres in the LGAs.

Asked whether the outbreak, first publicly flagged by DHHS on Sunday, had been linked to any workplaces or family groups, Professor­ Cheng said: “We’re still looking into that. We do know all the people, we know all the cases that have been reported, we know were they live, we know who they are, we‘ve spoken to them all.

“There are things that we don‘t know, and we’ve obviously contacted all their close contacts to make sure that they’re in quarantine and that they’re being monit­ored, but we always just need to be careful that, you know, is there someone that has been missed?

“Is there people out there in the community? There are still some unknown cases. We need to try and put a ring around those to make sure that those transmission chains are shut down as well.”

Asked on Monday whether there was a demographic trend in Casey with the virus, Chief Health Officer Brett Sutton said: “Yeah, there is. These are multicultural community members.” However, he said he believed the message to isolate and get tested was getting through to the community.

“I think it’s getting through well,’’ Professor Sutton said. “I’ve made an offer to personally speak to that community, having been to Afghanistan a couple of times over the years … I know that there are universal motivations that every family has to do the right thing to protect their own families and the wider community. That’s abso­lutely the case here and I know they’re motivated to get on top of this as much as anyone.”

The most recent census shows 56.2 per cent of Casey residents were born in Australia, 6 per cent in India, 3.8 per cent in Sri Lanka, 2.9 per cent in Afghanistan, 2.8 per cent in England and 2.4 per cent in New Zealand.