Via The Guardian: Coronavirus Victoria: 74 locally acquired cases recorded in highest daily increase. Excerpt:
Victoria has recorded its highest daily jump in locally acquired Covid-19 cases since the pandemic began, with 75 people testing positive and only one confirmed to be a returned international traveller.
“I think it will get worse before it gets better,” the state’s chief health officer, Brett Sutton, said.
“It is a concerning number. But it is very hard to make predictions in this space.”
He suggested that similar numbers could be expected in the days to come.
Victoria’s health minister, Jenny Mikakos, said on Monday most cases were from hotspot suburbs in the city’s north and west.
“Many of the cases that have come through today are overwhelmingly concentrated in those priority suburbs. We’ve got many cases across the inner northern suburbs and the western suburbs of Melbourne, but not exclusively.”
At the height of the first wave, Victoria reached 111 new cases in a day, but a much smaller proportion contracted the disease locally.
A week ago, Victoria was generally recording case numbers in the teens.
Of Monday’s cases, 14 were connected to existing or new outbreaks, 37 were discovered in routine testing and 23 are still under investigation.
Six previously reported cases were confirmed to have been contracted through community transmission where contact tracing could not establish the source of the infection.
There were two new family outbreaks in Truganinna in Melbourne’s west, with five cases, and in the Patterson Lakes-Lysterfield area in Melbourne’s south-east, with four cases.
The Stamford Plaza hotel cluster gained three cases, and the Wollert cluster grew by one. Four cases were added to the North Melbourne cluster, which has now been linked to the Brimbank family cluster. This is believed to bring the combined total of these outbreaks to 31.
Monday marks day five of the 10-day testing blitz in Melbourne’s hotspot suburbs, with 15,000 tests conducted in the past 24 hours.
