Victoria records 473 new local COVID-19 cases

Victoria has recorded 473 new cases of COVID-19 on Monday as four early learning centres across Melbourne were declared high-risk exposure sites.

Just 202 of the new locally acquired cases have been connected to the current outbreak, according to a Department of Health statement released on Twitter.

Quiet streets and empty buildings in Melbourne.Credit:

There were 30,032 vaccination doses administered across the state on Sunday, with more than 49,000 test results returned. Victoria now has 3507 active cases of the virus.

Health authorities have listed four childcare centres as tier-1 exposure sites, meaning children, staff and parents who visited the sites will need to isolate for 14 days.

Little Learners Early Education & Kindergarten in South Morang, in Melbourne’s north-east, is listed as an exposure site across various times on September 2, 3 and 6.

Ilim Learning Sanctuary Glenroy in the northern suburbs was visited by a positive case on September 3, and then on consecutive days between September 6 and September 8.

Truganina’s Yara Childcare Centre is listed as an exposure site between September 1 and September 3, and again on September 6 and 7, while the St Catherines Early Learning in Toorak is listed as a tier-1 site on September 6.

Children aged 12 to 15 eligible for Pfizer

In Victoria, children aged 12 to 15 years will be able to get vaccinated against COVID-19 from Monday.

Infectious diseases physician Associate Professor Paul Griffin said new data from the National Centre for Immunisation Research and Surveillance noted two per cent of children who catch COVID-19 are hospitalised, so it’s still “really important to protect our children so they don’t get unwell”.

“We did do the clinical trials and those younger children last, not because we thought the vaccine wasn’t going to work or wasn’t going to be safe, that’s just the natural progression of that clinical trials,” he told 3AW Breakfast.

“There is great data showing these vaccines work, even down as young as six months of age now. So, it won’t be long, I think, and most countries will include children in their strategies.”

University of Melbourne epidemiologist Tony Blakely said NSW and Victoria could tolerate up to 2000 cases a day “but not comfortably”, and it was important that the states did not go over that number.

“I think we might need to pivot to a different way of thinking about this and actually start thinking about what is our ceiling,” he told the ABC.

“We need to start thinking about the headroom we’ve got … Any alterations or openings up that we want to do - and that’s going to be the tricky part - is going to require clarity and honesty from politicians that when they open up, we’ll have to monitor and we may need to retreat, as we start threatening that limit.

“You want to open up with the numbers as low as possible, and going down, because if you open up when the numbers say going for 1000 are still going up very fast, it’s not a good scenario to be in.”

Victoria’s current Reff rate - a measure of how many people an infected person will pass the virus on to - is at 1.7.

Professor Blakely said mobility data showed there was more movement in Victoria’s current lockdown than there had been previously.

“There’s fatigue, and on your hour or two of exercise each day, you only need to walk around to see the number of people hanging outside cafes chatting to their mates and jabbering in parks,” he said.

“I don’t wish to be critical, because as human beings, we crave that social connectedness. I think we are all over lockdown here in Victoria, so it’s been hard to maintain compliance of the public health orders basically.”

More to come

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