Victorian Covid-19 lockdown: Contact fears amid QR delays

Victoria’s Covid-19 logistics chief has ­failed to explain why the state has taken up to eight months longer than other jurisdictions to make the move to a uniform QR code system.

Victorian chief Covid-19 testing officer Jeroen Weimar in Melbourne on Friday. Picture: Paul Jeffers

Victoria’s Covid-19 logistics chief has conceded moving to a uniform QR code system for venue check-ins will boost compliance, but ­failed to explain why the state has taken up to eight months longer than other jurisdictions to make the move.

Jeroen Weimar’s concession came as he issued a plea to people who may have attended five high-risk bars in Melbourne’s south and southeast over the weekend to come forward for testing, amid fears authorities may have been unable to contact a significant number of people who were present but did not check in.

As Victorians spent their first day in a week-long lockdown, four new cases were linked to the Whittlesea cluster, bringing the total to 30.

All four were primary close contacts of the cluster, including one person who is believed to have caught the virus from a friend when they met at the Sporting Globe Bar & Grill in the bayside suburb of Mordialloc on Sunday.

The health department also has concerns about the Three Monkeys Bar and Somewhere Bar in Chapel St, Prahran, The Palace hotel in South Melbourne, and The Local in Port Melbourne.

As early as October last year, Victorian Premier Daniel ­Andrews was under pressure to follow NSW and the ACT, which had introduced uniform QR code apps the previous month.

At the time, he cited the issue of compatibility with Victoria’s new Salesforce contact-tracing computer system to explain why his state had temporarily opted to allow venues to use as many as 16 different third-party systems while waiting for a simple government-mandated one that Victorians could use at every venue.

“If we could buy a product off the shelf or we could purchase something from another state, then we would, but I think it would be more … complex and would ­potentially put at risk some of the really clear benefits we get from having built a best-in-class IT platform,” Mr Andrews said.

Since January 1, every state ­except Victoria has had a uniform, mandatory check-in app, with the exception of WA, which made its mandatory on February 2.

It was not until earlier this month that the Andrews government announced it would be making the Service Victoria app mandatory for all hospitality ­venues from Friday.

Asked on Friday why it had taken so long, Mr Weimar offered no explanation other than to say that Victoria had now realised a uniform system was preferable to allowing businesses to implement their own, as occurred when the state reopened following last year’s second-wave lockdown.

“We allowed that, we kept a close eye on it, as we started to see that the performance was not what we needed it to be,” he said.

“Now, on the basis of the evidence that we’ve seen, and working closely with the business community, we’ve had to conclude that moving to one system was a more robust way of doing it, and that’s what we have now done.”

Having issued urgent call-outs to medical students and others in Victoria’s public service throughout Thursday to bolster the contact tracing team, the health department was scrambling on Friday to keep track of at least 15,000 people who had visited ­exposure sites, including almost 1500 primary close contacts.

There were more than 150 ­public exposure sites listed late on Friday, with what is believed to be a similar number of private sites at homes and small workplaces unlisted.

Chief health officer Brett Sutton confirmed Victoria had not taken up offers of assistance with contact tracing from the federal government and other states’ teams, preferring to enlist untrained students and public servants due to the lack of a nationwide computer system.

“We don’t have a national ­interoperable system of sharing contact tracing information across the country. It can take a team leader off their normal job to try and work through that process,” Professor Sutton said.

He revealed contact tracers had revised the suspected infectious period for the index case in the Whittlesea cluster back two days, to May 13, meaning a man in his 60s is believed to have been infectious in the community for 12 days and had symptoms for 10 days before he got tested earlier this week.