Coronavirus: Victoria bracing for harsh clamps

Victoria’s second wave of corona­virus infections is already much worse than its first.

Victorian Chief Health Officer Brett Sutton. Picture: NCA NewsWire / Andrew Henshaw

Victoria’s second wave of corona­virus infections is already much worse than its first, as Melbourne braces for an expanded lockdown amid more deaths and a new peak in infections.

As Premier Daniel Andrews and Chief Health Officer Brett Sutton spoke of a statewide or Melbourne metropolitan lockdown as “a possibility”, the numbers painted a graver picture, with 127 new cases notified on Monday, compared with the previous peak of 111 on March 28.

Back in March, just 21 cases with an unknown source had been identified, compared with 416 on Monday, including 145 in the past week alone.

On March 28, Victoria had 491 active cases, compared with 645 active cases on Monday.

A man in his 90s died of COVID-19 in a Victorian hospital on Sunday night, followed by a man in his 60s on Monday morning, bringing the state’s death toll to 22, with 31 corona­virus patients in the state’s hospitals, including five in intensive care.

While the locked down housing commission towers in Melbourne’s inner northwest have so far been linked to 53 cases, a cluster at Al-Taqwa Islamic College in the outer western suburb of Truganina has been identified as being at the centre of a cluster of 77 — representing Victoria’s second-worst outbreak so far, after the 111 cases linked to western suburbs abattoir Cedar Meats.

Ominously, Monday’s new notifications also included two separate cases in workers at other meatworks, including one at JBS abattoir in Brooklyn — the same western suburb as Cedar Meats; and one at Pacific Meats in the northern suburb of Thomastown.

As well as being home to Al-Taqwa College, Truganina has also been named as the site of a separate family outbreak so far linked to 16 cases, but despite this the Andrews government has not moved to lock down the postcode.

The local government area of Wyndham, where Truganina is located, had the second-highest number of active cases of any local government area in Victoria on Monday, with 86, yet none of its postcodes was locked down.

Of Victoria’s 645 active confirmed cases, 282, or 44 per cent, were in local government areas with no locked down postcodes.

Locked down Hume, in Melbourne’s outer north, has the highest number of active cases, with 124, while the City of Melbourne — which takes in some of the locked down housing commission towers as well as the CBD — is third, with 82.

Mr Andrews warned the pandemic in Victoria had a “long way to run”.

“Where we are now shows you that even a small number of cases, particularly if those cases coincide with people not following the rules, large family groups where people are ill going and ­visiting other large family groups, and so on, you can finish up with many hundreds and indeed thousands of cases as a direct result of that,” he said.

“This is serious, this is real, and no Victorian has any excuse but to take this seriously, otherwise we will finish up with a situation where all postcodes are locked down.

“I know people are sick and tired and fatigued of this global pandemic, the rules ... but this is where we’re at.

“There’s no vaccine. It’s wildly infectious. If people pretend it’s over, all they’ll be doing is spreading the virus, and then we will finish up with even more rules that’ll be even less palatable.”

Asked whether he had a threshold for returning Victoria or Melbourne to a full lockdown, given community transmissions are much higher than they were in March, Professor Sutton said that issue was “all for discussion”.

“We’re not excluding that possibility,” he said.

“We’ve always flagged that we’ve got these two tools: the testing and tracing tool, and the physical distancing tool.

“We’ve worked extremely hard to get the word out, because we know what works around physical distancing — but we need to form a view over coming days as to whether that’s a ­sufficient suppression of transmission.”