It is a tale of two lockdowns: Victorians, in the second day of their sixth lockdown, were slugged with news there were 29 new cases. Queenslanders, in the second last day of their lockdown, heard positive news about their outbreak, but will have to wait until Sunday to know if it will end as planned.
In both states, the messaging from politicians and health officials was nothing if not numbingly familiar.
“Keep staying home, get tested if you are unwell and get vaccinated,” the Queensland health minister, Yvette D’Ath, said.
“We don’t have enough people vaccinated,” the Victorian premier, Daniel Andrews, said.
With 12 of the 13 cases recorded in Queensland on Saturday not in the community while infectious (and the other under investigation), the news was far more encouraging in the sunshine state than in Victoria.
Further south, health authorities have not even found the source of its outbreak, but Andrews confirmed it was the Delta variant and it was “from New South Wales”.
The cases recorded in Victoria on Saturday were all linked to known cases. But the source of those cases remains unknown, with one theory that they originated from a couple who travelled to Victoria on 15 July after completing quarantine in NSW and later tested positive.
“You know, it is pleasing that we don’t have another seven mystery cases or even one mystery case. There are linkages,” Andrews said.
“The question is – how many days out in the community have those cases spent? Who else have they infected? Are all of those infected people coming forward?”
The current Victorian outbreak has again spread into a public housing tower in Flemington, as it did last year. As during that outbreak, the link again appears to be a student at Al-Taqwa College.
Victoria’s Covid commander, Jeroen Weimar, said the student lived in a household of eight in the tower, but the family had been moved out of the building.
The government appears to be approaching this outbreak differently, declaring only the floor the family lived in as a tier-one site, meaning residents there will have to isolate for 14 days, while those in the rest of the building will only have to record a negative test before ending isolation.
But despite the change in approach, Andrews was dismissive of criticism by the ombudsman of the harsh stance taken to residents in the same towers last year, saying it had “saved lives”.
Andrews said the prime minister, Scott Morrison, told him on Friday night that Victoria would be allocated an extra 150,000 doses of Pfizer vaccine, and that he would soon announce plans on how they would be used.
But he said the new doses were not enough to change the criteria for the vaccine, including whether teachers should be prioritised, given there had been another cluster linked to a school.
“It’s only 150,000. It’s better than not having it, but it’s not 1.5 million. You know, we’ve got limited supply.
“I’m not critical of any group who mounts the case that they should be higher up the queue than they are now. There’s literally hundreds and thousands of groups that can mount a really compelling argument.
“The problem is that we don’t have the stock. We just don’t have the supply.”
The Queensland deputy premier, Steven Miles, said he was pleased the state was recording more than the 40,000 daily tests it had set itself as a goal.
“It is important to know we will see continued cases, many people in households with a case will continue to catch the virus in the coming days and weeks.
“What is most important is that they are not outside of their household, they are not infectious in the community.”
Queensland’s chief medical officer, Dr Jeannette Young, described Saturday’s numbers as encouraging, but said she would needed to see Sunday’s figures before providing her health advice about lifting restrictions.
