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A priority vaccine reservation line for Grade 12 students in Victoria was swamped with 30,000 calls as of Monday morning, as the state recorded its highest number of daily cases since August last year.
There were 246 cases reported on Monday, the highest number since August 16, 2020, just two weeks after the start of the hard second wave lockdown, when the state recorded 266 cases.
It comes as Victoria announced one-time payments of $ 1,500 to provide rent relief to people who pay more than 30% of their income in rent and have lost at least 20% of that income due to coronavirus restrictions. .
Housing Minister Richard Wynne said the government is also asking landlords to “show a level of compassion” to tenants. The same request was made last year, with mixed results.
There were 92 people in Victoria Hospital on Monday, 26 in intensive care and 14 on ventilators. Only 10 of those hospitalized had been partially vaccinated and one person who had been fully vaccinated was well enough to be released on Monday morning, Health Minister Martin Foley said.
Thirteen of the 92 were too young to be eligible for a vaccine when they were diagnosed, Foley said, and 67 were eligible but not vaccinated.
Grade 12 students, Grade 11 students following Grade 12 subjects, as well as teachers and staff doing end-of-year exams have priority access to Covid vaccine reservations with the goal of having them double vaccinated by the first week of October, when assessments are due to begin.
Schools sent a priority reservation number over the weekend.
Foley said the line was “extremely busy” with “extremely enthusiastic” 12 and 11 students, with 30,000 calls before 11am.
There are between 50,000 and 67,000 students who need priority access to vaccines.
Victoria’s Covid response commander Jeroen Weimar said doses had been reserved for each student taking the grade 12 exams.
“There is no frantic rush,” he said. “The doses are reserved for you. Anyone who wants to do it can do it. “
As of Monday, 60.9% of Victorians over 16 had received at least one dose of a Covid vaccine. The restrictions are due to a slight easing in Melbourne when the state hits a first-dose vaccination rate of 70%, which, if current numbers continue, will be next week.
Foley said the UK’s first doses of Pfizer, obtained by the federal government as part of a 4 million dose swap deal, were arriving in Australia today and are expected to be rolled out in clinics around the world. here the end of the week.
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He said restrictions in the Victoria area – with the exception of Shepparton and the Goulburn Valley – would be relaxed before that date, although he is not announcing when or what the easing might entail. However, he said it would not be a “step back” to the very weak restrictions of April or May.
Half of the new cases reported on Monday were in the northern suburbs of Melbourne and a third in the western suburbs.
Among the cases in the northern suburbs was a security guard who works at an immigration center in Broadmeadows.
Weimar said the positive case is a guard who works outside the facility and “has no contact with internal staff.” He said the responsibility for testing detainees rests with the Commonwealth.
Weimar said the virus was spreading through households and also small community-owned businesses in those suburbs, as well as through essential workers.
“If essential workers are not on top of their symptoms, not getting vaccinated and testing regularly, this poses a significant risk in terms of further transmission,” he said.
He dismissed suggestions that contact tracing had been delayed in Victoria, saying contact tracers are still in the “green” to meet their state and national goals to contact positive cases and close contacts within the allotted timeframe. . Instead, he said the problem was a “tired” population who have become less vigilant about complying with public health measures.
“We absolutely see people saying, it’s just too hard, I can’t do it anymore,” he said.
“We see small violations here and there of all these rules that have held us back [from high numbers] for so long.”
Weimar said it was still “collectively in our ability” to slow transmission rates and control the outbreak, but that even if small violations continue to occur, the virus will continue to spread.
“[It will] expand beyond the inner northern and western suburbs, ”he said. “The consequence of this [will be] a lot more people with HIV, a lot more people going to hospital and a lot more people ending up in intensive care and in a very bad place. “
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