Victoria COVID LIVE updates: State records three more local COVID-19 cases as exposure site list grows to 320

It sounds like the confusion at the Showgrounds was a one-off, with readers full of praise for staff at vaccination sites and letting us know that they seem to be running very smoothly.

Nancy said she went to Sandown on Monday, for “a booking at 1.50pm and it was set up and worked like a well-oiled machine. I was in and out within an hour which I was very happy with. Staff were great and the public were great.”

Jamie also had nothing but praise for the Sandown hub: “Great job by all involved. Get on board!”

Elliot told us he was in and out of the Showgrounds within an hour, including his 15 minutes’ wait time, while Elle made it in 50 minutes: “The showgrounds were brilliant. Didn’t need a QR code, my booking was in the system.“

Jeremy said South Morang had him in and out in 90 minutes.

From John: “Heidelberg Repat centre is working flawlessly. Very short waiting time for walk-ups. Great people, systems smooth.”

Russell said after a long process booking directly with Box Hill hospital, “the process was really smooth. We waited to check in for about 10-15 mins and then completed the paperwork and pretty much went straight in. After about 15 mins we were allowed to go. The whole process took about 45 mins.”

At Geelong, both staff and patients at the hub at the Ford factory impressed Lesley. “I had a booking and had a short wait but the whole process was very smooth. There was a long line for walk-ins – around 2 hours I believe – but people were waiting patiently and being well looked after by the staff there.

“It’s so good to see people rising to the call to get vaccinated and the staff are really doing their best to make sure people are seen as quickly as they can. We are all in this together – we need to do our bit and be kind to each other.”

Schools across Victoria are taking a week of remote learning in their stride, but are already making plans for a possible extension of time out of the classroom beyond Thursday.

Primary school teacher Megan Gibb balances teaching from home with supervising her son Hudson, who is in year 1, and learning remotely this week.

Ms Gibbs’ advice? “Do what works for your family,” she says.

Do what you can, but don’t stress out if you can’t do it all, is what she told her pupils last week.

Ms Gibb admits it was a pep talk for herself as much as her students, three of whom cried at the news, unsure of when they would all be back together in the classroom.

Read Adam Carey’s full story here.

Wine merchant Jagdev Singh posted an offer on Instagram on Monday to use donations from his customers to help send boxes of food to those in need during lockdown.

Within two hours of that post, his company had organised more than 200 boxes of fresh, donated ingredients to be delivered to some of the city’s most vulnerable people.

Mr Singh is among a number of people around Melbourne who have mobilised since the seven-day statewide coronavirus lockdown took effect on Friday, helping those who have lost work or been affected financially by the shutdown.

Read more here.

We haven’t reached morning tea yet but the estimates hearing on health has already devolved into shouting.

It’s all around who is responsible for aged care vaccinations. Labor says the answer to that should be simple, but that’s not so, according to Aged Care Services Minister Richard Colbeck.

“Are you responsible for aged care?” Senator Katy Gallagher said.

“That’s not a yes or no answer,” Senator Colbeck responded, accusing Senator Gallagher of haranguing him.

“It would be very nice if you actually let me answer the question instead of yelling at me across the table.”

Senator Colbeck said the Commonwealth was running a co-operative program to roll out the vaccine with states and territories, and aged care workers could get vaccinated through state-run hubs.

Labor senator Murray Watt asked: “Isn’t the federal government responsible for making sure that aged care workers get the vaccine?”

Senator Colbeck said it was a collective responsibility.

“It is not about pitting the states against the Commonwealth in this circumstance, we are co-operatively working on this together,” he said.

There has been a lot of focus this morning on the data tracking Australia’s vaccine rollout, so here’s a quick summary of the level of detail in Australia’s publicly available vaccine data.

The rollout started on February 22, and about a week later the Health Department started providing weekly total dose numbers. Data also started being published on the vaccine utilisation rate in each jurisdiction.

On April 8, vaccine rollout updates started being released on a daily basis, which provided a breakdown of total doses administered in each state and territory. The figures tallied up the number of doses administered by the states, as part of the GP rollout and as part of the aged/disability care rollout.

And that’s pretty much it as far as the level of detail in the publicly available data has progressed.

As it stands, the data does not provide a full breakdown of first and second doses administered nationwide, so it is not possible to say how many Australians have been fully vaccinated. Nor is there a breakdown of doses administered by phase, by age group, by occupation, by local government area or by vaccine type.

This explainer I wrote in April goes into the limitations of the data in more detail. We’ve been asking the Health Department to provide more detailed vaccine rollout data, but its response is that the current level of detail is what was agreed to by national cabinet.

The Department of Health confirmed it could not provide data on how many of each vaccines had been administered. The data that’s published by the department has been publicised in agreement with National Cabinet.

How has Victoria’s pandemic response improved from last year? According to Chief Medical Officer Professor Paul Kelly, the big changes have been strengthened contact tracing and testing regimes.

“In contrast to last year, Victoria has been very rapid in its … understanding of the outbreak,” he told a Senate estimates committee.

“Almost all of the cases have been very closely epidemiologically linked, and there has been a small number of cases that would be described as casual contact, but most of them have been very close household contacts, workplace contacts.”

He said the scaling up of testing has also been extraordinary.

“They’re getting on top of extremely large numbers of close contacts, casual contacts and secondary contacts – we’re in the 10s of thousands now,” he said.

For most people heading to the vaccination hubs it sounds like it’s running smoothly, but not so for The Age’s print editor Selma Milovanovic, who has dropped us a line from the coronavirus vaccine queue at the Showgrounds, where some people have been sent to the wrong gate by phone and follow-up email.

She says she was sent to Gate 5 (staff entry only) on Langs Road, quite a distance from the correct entrance on Epsom Road, next to Coles.

“The security guard said he had to redirect dozens of people today,” Selma said. “After contacting friends who have similar appointments to alert them of the mistake, I learnt they had not even received the email with the QR code which is proof of booking.

“It arrived to me 20 hours after the phone call.”

Have you had your shot? How did it go? Let us know.

Senators are asking why the Department of Health has not been tracking data on aged care worker vaccinations.

About 70,000 aged care workers have been vaccinated through in-reach programs at aged care facilities, however they are also able to get vaccinated at GP clinics, special pop-up sites and state-run hubs.

The data on how many staff have been vaccinated through those other channels is yet to be collated.

Greens senator Rachel Siewert asked Aged Care Services Minister Richard Colbeck why that data collection was not required from the beginning.

“We’ve subsequently put in place a process where we require providers to give us that information,” he said.

Just to refresh your memory, the federal government’s initial goal was to have the majority of the 190,000 disability and aged care residents and roughly 320,000 workers vaccinated in the first six weeks of the rollout. We are now more than three months into the national vaccination program.

For those playing at home, this committee hearing will go until 11pm, but more of the important questions on vaccines will occur in the morning.

We’ll also hear from Chief Medical Officer Professor Paul Kelly, as well as the Therapeutic Goods Administration head Professor John Skerrit.