The coronavirus is spreading across Melbourne’s western suburbs despite four weeks of hard lockdown, infecting large households and essential workplaces there.
It comes as Victoria has filled all but 9,000 of 450,000 available bookings to receive the Pfizer vaccine in just two days, after opening its state hubs to people as young as 16. There are still 150,000 bookings available for people to receive their first dose of AstraZeneca.
The state government has also introduced a new permit for people departing hotel quarantine as part of its border system.
People arriving in Victoria from other states, territories and New Zealand all need to have a border permit to enter.
Victorian health minister, Martin Foley, said the departing hotel quarantine permit would replace the green permit that international arrivals previously had to get to enter Victoria after quarantining interstate.
It requires people to have a test 17 days after commencing hotel quarantine, and “strongly recommends” a day 21 test.
Forty-six of the 79 cases reported in Victoria on Friday were in the inner western suburbs around Newport and Wyndham, bringing the number of cases reported in the area since the outbreak began to 150.
Victoria’s coronavirus response commander, Jeroen Weimar, said the west was “a significant area of concern”.
“We believe there are multiple chains of transmission and we’re looking at quite significant community transmission ongoing,” he said.
Foley said high case numbers in the inner west “reflects the nature of demographics and work patterns as opposed to anything particularly described to the people of the west”.
“The western suburbs is disproportionately a community that is full of essential workers and permitted workers,” he said. “They are out and about. There are other issues about a very small number of some people, not just confined to the western suburbs, who do not follow the rules. And that puts everyone at risk.”
Foley said the high demand for vaccine appointments from younger Victorians, since state hubs began accepting bookings to administer Pfizer to people aged 16 to 40, showed that “hesitancy is not a problem with Victorians in those age groups”.
But he said that pace could not be maintained unless the federal government provided greater certainty about future vaccine supply.
“If we are going to continue this rate of fill-in, the opportunities as they become available, while at the same time making sure we continue to work the priority groups that we committed to help the commonwealth on, to meet the aged care and disability requirements for the commonwealth … we need all the supply we could lay our hands on,” he said.
Foley said it was too early to say when schools in Victoria might return for on-site learning, despite New South Wales committing to students returning from 25 October, saying that would be dependent on vaccination levels in both students and the broader adult community.
It comes as the Australian Technical Advisory Group on Immunisation said children as young as 12 could get the Pfizer vaccine, with bookings to open on 13 September.
“We want to get them vaccinated … because Delta finds the unvaccinated,” Foley said. “This particular outbreak has been disproportionately in younger people and we have to make sure that when we do reopen schools it’s done safely.”
The cases reported on Friday also included 10 cases in Shepparton, including a person who works at an aged care home in Echuca, about an hour’s drive north.
The woman has been fully vaccinated and has not worked at the Echuca Community for the Aged facility at Wharparilla Lodge since 20 August.
“Given the person involved had been fully vaccinated, and had PPE equipment on, was doing all the right things, given that in the high levels of vaccination of residents in the facility we hope that the result will be that one case and one case only, but we are working cooperatively (with the commonwealth),” Foley said.
Forty staff members at the facility have been furloughed.
Weimar thanked the people of Shepparton for their “exceptional response” to the outbreak, which has put a quarter of the town into isolation and prompted the Victorian government to request assistance from the army to deliver food parcels and other support.
He dismissed a suggestion that Victoria should conduct a targeted vaccination program at essential workplaces that had been identified as exposure sites, saying “we are now targeting the whole population”.
“It is very hard with a limited supply out there to play whack-a-mole with vaccines and chase outbreaks around,” he said. “We do it from time to time if we think there is value to it, but the virus is moving far quicker than the vaccination program will move, so we need to ensure the whole population is vaccinated, not just those in the immediate line of fire.”
As of 11am, 16 of the cases reported on Friday are still under investigation, down from 26 cases reported before 9am. Nineteen were in isolation for the entirety of their infectious period, and that figure was expected to rise following contact tracing interviews.
