Victoria’s health minister says it is an “hour-to-hour proposition” as to whether Melbourne’s hard lockdown will end on Thursday, as Covid-19 cases rise in the city.
In order to lift restrictions, the number of daily cases in the community while infectious must be at or close to zero, but Victoria recorded 20 local cases on Tuesday, only five of whom were in quarantine. All cases have been linked to known outbreaks.
The state health minister, Martin Foley, said it was still too soon to say if the state could reach its goal by Thursday, when lockdown is slated to end.
“It is really a day-to-day proposition, and sometimes an hour-to-hour proposition. But we’ve seen one case a couple of days ago being in quarantine, now we’ve got five. What we want to do is obviously improve on that trend,” he said.
“I don’t know what the future brings. The crystal ball hasn’t fired up lately. What we’ll do is follow the public health advice as it comes in.”
Meanwhile, the regional areas of Victoria have been released from lockdown, although guests at private homes are still banned and masks must be worn in all public indoor and outdoor settings.
The state also recorded one of its highest-ever days of vaccinations on Monday, with 22,670 jabs going into arms at vaccination hubs. Foley said he was sure an “even stronger number” was administered through the GP network.
For the first time, younger Victorians were also in the queues for AstraZeneca at the hubs after eligibility at these facilities was expanded to include under 40s. Foley said 2,366 first doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine were administered on Monday.
“That is a more than threefold increase when compared to the Monday of the previous week,” he said.
“Young people are coming forward to get vaccinated. They’re doing it for their local community, sporting clubs, their cultural organisations. They’re doing it for their workplaces and they’re doing it because they want to get to a Covid-normal world as rapidly as we possibly can.”
But Victorian health authorities are still acutely concerned about a cluster connected with the CS Square shopping centre in Caroline Springs in Melbourne’s west, which accounted for 10 of Tuesday’s 20 cases.
Jeroen Weimar, Victoria’s Covid-19 commander, reiterated that the entire shopping centre has now been declared a tier 2 exposure site for a period of ten days between 27 July and 5 August, meaning shoppers must get tested immediately and isolate until they are confirmed to be negative.
“The area of most concern to us today is Caroline Springs and continues to be Caroline Springs,” he said. “We have seen now 25 cases associated with the Caroline Springs Square shopping centre across a number of different units, a number of different retail units and people.”
Two of those cases were not yet connected to specific hotspot stores in the shopping centre, meaning people may have been infected from “fleeting” contact.
Victoria’s deputy secretary of Covid response, Kate Matson, said authorities were still investigating the source of these infections.
“We do know they went to CS Square,” she said. “We don’t know whether it was a fleeting transmission in perhaps one of the common areas related to the toilets … passing someone in an open area or whether they went to one of the identified retail sites.”
There are now 76 cases connected to the latest outbreak and 111 active infections in the state in total.
With restrictions now varying across the state, city dwellers trying to flee Melbourne and head to regional areas will face fines upwards of $5000. About 200 police have been deployed to main and back roads.
Businesses that are open in regional Victoria but closed in Melbourne, such as restaurants and beauty salons, must now check the IDs of customers.
In Melbourne, there are more than 12,000 close contacts of infected cases self-isolating and almost 250 exposure sites.
Additional reporting by AAP
