Australian Reports of the Virus Spread

[blackcat20]

For those unfamiliar with the Murray, there are a number of "twin" towns that effectively operate as one city.

Especially Albury/Wodonga. As an example of the the hospital located in NSW there is actually operated by Vic.

There are many other locations where there are towns on one side which are major work and shopping locations for people from across the river in the other state.

I wonder how that will work where people live on one side and work on the other...

 

[lovetravellingoz]

400 tests in towers yesterday.

An increase of 26. So if results were back on all 400 that is a high positive rate (Speculation- some may have been from tests the day prior. You would think though that the apartment tower tests would be fast-tracked).

This certainly vindicates the lockdown of the towers.

Priority has been given to supplying services first , with testing to follow. So many will still need to be tested in the towers.

 

[jase05]

I wonder how that will work where people live on one side and work on the other...

They will have exemptions

 

[lovetravellingoz]

With the surge in testing in Vic it is likely that Vic will have the highest coughulative tests in Australia by tomorrow.

TESTS
Total Tests Conducted

STATE	TESTS	DEL	NET
New South Wales	953,987		11,555
Victoria	952,699		24,528

Vic already has the highest testing rate. But unfortunately it may well also soon have the highest coughulative case rate too passing first NSW and then Tas

 

[Princess Fiona]

I am worried about the management plan for the positives. Whatever the plan was at Newmarch in Sydney it clearly failed. Some of the families in the Melbourne Towers have enough kids for a sports team but only 3 or 4 bedrooms. If one person tests positive but does not require hospital treatment then how do you prevent the spread to the rest of the family?

I am very concerned about that too. I hope that the infection control procedures are robust and that there is enough access to appropriate PPE and health care for the residents and staff working there.

 

[Flying mermaid]

Andrews said NSW has been helping with processing tests and will do more. He also reiterated that everyone is working together to help Victoria. He will probably be getting more ADF support and possibly AFP and commonwealth Public servants.

 

[I love to travel]

Vic Premier seems grumpy today. You have to feel for him he must be exhausted.

 

[lovetravellingoz]

I wonder how that will work where people live on one side and work on the other...

Well cases are zero, or close to it in these regions and so if it was me I would create a bubble around the towns as there is virtually no risk from people living in these towns. They will mainly want to not have people travelling up from suburbs/towns with cases.

If you have proof of residency I would allow easy transfer within the bubble with say a priority queue for this at the crossing within the twin towns.

 

[serfty]

A rumour (inaccurate at best) on 3AW (highly inaccurate as a promise ) so will believe it when I hear it from official sources

That is why I was specific ... a rumour.

FWIW, the "Rumour File" has revealed many a prior unpublished fact. Fortunately in this case it was incorrect.

The Rumour File - 3AW

www.3aw.com.au

 

[Must...Fly!]

Andrews said NSW has been helping with processing tests and will do more. He also reiterated that everyone is working together to help Victoria. He will probably be getting more ADF support and possibly AFP and commonwealth Public servants.

ADF support in the state control centre is not a unique nor particularly significant contribution, and is part of regular business in the state EM arrangements. Victoria has rebuked commonwealth support at some levels for quite some time, and the Victorian attitude that the state government has capacity to handle any and all requirements is coming back to bite them big time.

 

[jakeseven7]

Qantas staff got a good plug
Glad to see they are being put to good use!

 

[Flying mermaid]

ADF support in the state control centre is not a unique nor particularly significant contribution, and is part of regular business in the state EM arrangements. Victoria has rebuked commonwealth support at some levels for quite some time, and the Victorian attitude that the state government has capacity to handle any and all requirements is coming back to bite them big time.

They are also bringing in about 100 clinical support from the ADF as well.

 

[lovetravellingoz]

Andrews said NSW has been helping with processing tests and will do more.

Labs in many states are processing tests for Vic.

Vic capacity is about 20k per day, whereas they want to test about 25K per day. So the additional 5K per days needs to be done interstate as otherwise a huge lag would build up on getting tests results.

Wed 24 Jun	696,263		20,999
Thu 25 Jun	716,567		20,304
Fri 26 Jun	736,735		20,168
Sat 27 Jun	758,838		22,103
Sun 28 Jun	776,792		17,954
Mon 29 Jun	792,173		15,381
Tue 30 Jun	809,589		17,416
Wed 1 Jul	830,271		20,682
Thu 2 Jul	856,591		26,320
Fri 3 Jul	881,021		24,430
Sat 4 Jul	906,574		25,553
Sun 5 Jul	928,171		21,597
Mon 6 Jul	952,699		24,528

 

[Pushka]

When the PM expected the borders to remain open, he did expect that each Premier and Health Dept were adequately resourced to deal with outbreaks as they occur. He did not expect that Premiers would refuse help when clearly things started spinning. And no one expected the quarantine process to have been managed so very very poorly.

SA has been doing Vic Health tests as well as providing clinical nurses and our top epidemiologist for a fortnight now. I wonder if thats how they honed in on the Housing Estates.

 

[lovetravellingoz]

ADF support in the state control centre is not a unique nor particularly significant contribution, and is part of regular business in the state EM arrangements. Victoria has rebuked commonwealth support at some levels for quite some time, and the Victorian attitude that the state government has capacity to handle any and all requirements is coming back to bite them big time.

Any and all is not an accurate statement as ADF personel have been doing various things in Vic throughout the pandemic. But no, not hotel quarantine.

ie

ADF personel are working in the contact tracing team and were brought in very early in the piece.

Army Engineers were also brought in to radically boost the capacity of a Victorian facemask manufacturer.
"We've gone from possibly making two million masks a year to all of a sudden ramping up to a potential two million masks a week," Mr Csizar said.

Army called in to help Australia's only face-mask producer during coronavirus

On the outskirts of a Victorian country town, inside a tiny but busy factory, we find some unassuming heroe...

9now.nine.com.au

 

[Hvr]

SA has been doing Vic Health tests as well as providing clinical nurses and our top epidemiologist for a fortnight now. I wonder if thats how they honed in on the Housing Estates.

And sharing of resources is how we as a country will get through this pandemic. At the moment it's Melbourne. Next month it could be Sydney, Adelaide or anywhere and if Melbourne staff capacity they will also assist.

We're at the beginning of this crisis, not the end. There is a long way to go.

 

[drron]

For those unfamiliar with the Murray, there are a number of "twin" towns that effectively operate as one city.

Especially Albury/Wodonga. As an example of the the hospital located in NSW there is actually operated by Vic.

There are many other locations where there are towns on one side which are major work and shopping locations for people from across the river in the other state.

Not quite true.In 2009 the NSW and Vic Governments agreed to run Albury hospital and Wodonga hospital in the same organisation-Albury Wodonga Health.
NSW and Victorian governments cooperate on the running and together plan upgrades and changes to services.
So early this year they jointly announced an upgrade to the ED with $30 million supplied by NSW and to build a short stay unit with $6 million supplied by the Victorian government.

News - Albury-Wodonga Health redevelopment to begin

The New South Wales and Victorian governments are working together to build a new emergency department and the first short stay unit at Albury Wodonga Health to meet the future health needs of the community.

www.health.nsw.gov.au

 

[dajop]

Well cases are zero, or close to it in these regions and so if it was me I would create a bubble around the towns as there is virtually no risk from people living in these towns. They will mainly want to not have people travelling up from suburbs/towns with cases.

Why not just create a bubble around Melbourne Rural Victoria currently has very few active cases (outside the "Commuter Zone" (i.e. fringes of Melbourne, including Melton etc) there are 5 active cases - one each in Bendigo, Shepparton, East Gippsland, Wellington (around Sale), Golden Plains (which covers the area between Ballarat and Gellong).

 

[lovetravellingoz]

SA has been doing Vic Health tests as well as providing clinical nurses and our top epidemiologist for a fortnight now. I wonder if thats how they honed in on the Housing Estates.

.
I would imagine that it will have been identified the same way they honed in on the other clusters. ie All positive tests are examined for links in location, work and other possible contacts.

Where people live is the easiest link to determine as obviously anyone tested will have had their address logged at the time of testing. So identifying and realising a cluster is at an apartment complex is not going to require that much skill to identify as it is only matching an address. If they use BigData tools (these are universally available in this day and age) and I cannot envisage that they would not be, this will be done automatically as results are logged.

The other possible contacts being harder as not all contacts will be known beyond the easy one such as family, friends and work colleagues and so it can take some time for contract tracers to extract these.


Linking clusters, and indeed linking even just individual cases to other cases, often requires genomic testing and tracing when there are no obvious links. In Victoria this in mainly performed by the at The Peter Doherty Institute public health epidemiology team by their bioinformaticians who have so far genomically sequenced about 80% of Victoria’s cases, and this is an ongoing project. There is a lag of some weeks to perform this task and so the tests for the apartment tower positive cases quite probably have not yet been sequenced.

 

[jakeseven7]

Just heard on ABC radio, NSW police had to shut down a party of 1000 people in Byron last night..... oh dear. ABC radio said it was unconfirmed yet if there were people with symptoms in attendance.... Hope this isn't a spark of a cluster....

Googled and its just breaking so apologies in advance for posting such a rubbish link to such a low brow publication...

Byron Bay party with 1,000 guests shut down in violation of COVID-19

The idyllic seaside suburb on New South Wales' far north coast attracted criticism because residents and holidaymakers largely appeared to flout coronavirus restrictions.

www.dailymail.co.uk