Victoria COVID LIVE updates: State records just one new local case; restrictions ‘on track’ to ease with 25km radius limit on travel

As best as anyone can tell, Horsham is COVID-free. It hasn’t had a case this year and since the pandemic began, has only had 14 confirmed infections. Right now, you are as likely to drown in the surf as die from COVID in the land-locked, Wimmera town.

Despite this, Sandra Muller is unable to travel from her Horsham home to Townsville to be with her husband as he recovers in intensive care from a workplace accident. For no obvious public health benefit, a family has been separated by blunt bureaucratic instrument at a time when they require compassion and understanding.

In recent weeks, a Victorian mother has been unable to hold a proper funeral for her young son and another has been unable to hold her prematurely born baby because of the inflexibility of our COVID rules and the public health officials who enforce them.

Human rights lawyer Greg Barns sees a parallel between of our treatment of asylum seekers, driven by a myopic obsession with border security, and the way individual circumstance counts for little in a narrow, public health calculus that considers only the potential spread of a virus.

“It is a similar mindset,” Barns tells The Age.

“It is about saying, in the context of a manufactured or real crisis, that the government must hold the line irrespective of the patent injustice or damage that is causing to the lives of individuals.

“It is not only the discretionary decision-making power, it is inflexibility of the way that power is exercised. You get decisions which are in the parameters of the discretion, but simply fly in the face of fairness, equity and compassion.”

Public health officials are not bloodless bureaucrats. As Victorian Chief Health Officer Brett Sutton and Queensland Chief Health Officer Jeannette Young have publicly reflected on, doing their jobs throughout the pandemic has involved agonising choices.

“You get torn apart over this stuff, I continue to,” Professor Sutton said during an Australian Health Practitioner Regulation Agency podcast after last year’s second wave.

Read more here.

When the Australian borders were closed in March last year, Liberal voters Sikander Kang and his wife supported the decision, even though it kept them separated from their toddler son who was being cared for by his grandparents in Punjab, India.

At the time, they thought the separation would be short-term.

But 15 months later the Melbourne family says all their pleas for a repatriation flight for their son with their parents from India have been rejected. They are wondering if they should move to Canada in the hopes of reuniting with three-year-old Viraj.

When Kang’s wife suffered a back injury after Viraj’s birth in 2018, his parents left their home in Punjab to help care for the baby and his older sister Sehar, then 7, in Melbourne.

In early 2020, all the Kangs went back to India for a family wedding. In early March, the couple left Viraj with the grandparents so the mother could start a new job and Sikander could start his nursing course. They brought Sehar home with them to start school.

Sikander’s parents were scheduled to follow in just a few weeks so that Viraj could spend his second birthday at home in Melbourne with his parents.

But the pandemic struck. The Australian citizens have missed out on 15 months of their son’s life and have no idea when they’ll see their youngest again.

Every plea for an exemption for their parents to bring home their child has been rejected.

“Last week he told us he had already packed his bags and asked us to send a helicopter to bring him home – that brought stabs to my heart,” Sikander said.

Read more here.

The pandemic has shown that radical changes can be made to the health system, and they can be made quickly. Take telehealth: previously on track to be implemented over 10 years, it was introduced overnight thanks to COVID-19.

“These things were impossible, and then all of a sudden, you flick a switch, and they’re not impossible,” the president of the Australian Medical Association, Dr Omar Khorshid, told The Age .

Healthcare has been front and centre since the pandemic began, and Dr Khorshid says it is critical that health remains in the spotlight once the danger passes.

Dr Khorshid will on Wednesday launch the association’s blueprint for fixing Australia’s fractured health system in a speech to the National Press Club amid fears the health lessons of the pandemic risk being forgotten.

“We want to grab this before we lose it, this opportunity to reform our health system,” he said. “We need to be acting now to do what we can to make the system more sustainable.”

The association’s Vision For Australia’s Health outlines the chronic issues within Australia’s health system, and points out that Australia has historically under-invested in health.

Prior to the pandemic, Australian health spending was 9.3 per cent of GDP, less than other comparable countries and almost half the spend of the US.

Increased funding for hospitals, widened use of telehealth across primary and hospital care and improved focus on preventative health are some of the areas the association would like to see improve.

Read more here.

For many years, Melbourne was the world’s most livable city. Two years ago, our fair city was second. This year, it has dropped to eighth. Equal eighth.

The Global Liveability Index 2021, released by The Economist intelligence unit, crowned Auckland, New Zealand, the most livable city in a year rocked by the COVID-19 pandemic.

Osaka, Japan, was runner-up while our own Adelaide (we won’t mention the quarantine breach) rocketed up the list to round out the top three.

Australian and New Zealand cities took out six of the top 10 spots.

“The extent to which cities were sheltered by strong border closures, their ability to handle the health crisis and the pace at which they rolled out vaccination campaigns drove significant changes in the rankings,” the report found.

“Six of the top 10 cities in the March 2021 survey are in New Zealand or Australia, where tight border controls have allowed residents to live relatively normal lives.

“Many European and Canadian cities have fallen down the rankings, having battled a second COVID-19 wave by restricting cultural and sporting events, and closing schools and restaurants.

“Auckland, in New Zealand, is at the top … owing to the city’s ability to contain the coronavirus pandemic faster and thus lift restrictions earlier, unlike others around the world.”

The report also found that the overall global average liveability score fell by seven points, when compared with the average pre-pandemic score.

The 10 most liveable cities in the world:

1. Auckland, New Zealand
2. Osaka, Japan
3. Adelaide, Australia
4. Wellington, New Zealand
5. Tokyo, Japan
6. Perth, Australia
7. Zurich, Switzerland
8. Geneva, Switzerland and Melbourne, Australia
9. (none, due to equal eighth, above)
10. Brisbane, Australia

Victoria’s Opposition Leader Michael O’Brien has again questioned the Andrews government’s management of its hotel quarantine hotels, saying he was deeply concerned the first Delta variant case stayed at a hotel that recorded dozens of breaches.

We reported today that the Novotel in Melbourne Central recorded 51 violations, including 15 related to infection control, in the month before a man arrived from Sri Lanka who unwittingly spawned the state’s Delta variant outbreak.

Mr O’Brien, who called for a significant easing of lockdown rules, said our report proved the state government had not been able to hire appropriate staff to oversee hotels.

Another two senior hotel quarantine agency staff were let go last month over separate breaches.

“Another leak from hotel quarantine, more breaches, more people sacked,” he said. “If the government can’t manage the systems of hotel quarantine, what’s to say they could manage a system at Avalon?”

Melburnians will be restricted to travelling no more than 25 kilometres from their homes as part of new eased restrictions to come into effect from Friday.

The government is set to ease lockdown restrictions as planned this week, barring any unexpected mystery cases.

A source close to the state government, who spoke on the condition of anonymity as they were not authorised to speak publicly, confirmed the new bubble rule to The Age last night.

The distance will prevent Melburnians from regional travel for the upcoming Queen’s Birthday long weekend.

Senior cabinet ministers met last night to work through plans and will meet again today morning to finalise the details that will be announced later in the day.

Government sources say metropolitan Melbourne will probably move to settings similar to those now applying in regional areas.

It is likely masks will still be required indoors, density caps will apply at venues and limits will apply to household and outdoor gatherings.

Students are expected to return to schools next week and regional restrictions are also expected to ease further.

Read more here.

The official tally of Victorian coronavirus exposure sites has dropped by another 50 sites overnight.

Health authorities started culling older listings from Victoria’s official exposure site list yesterday, taking the list from 314 at 9pm on Monday night to 197 by this morning.

Just one public exposure site was added yesterday: the vaccination hub at Melbourne Convention and Exhibition Centre was listed as a tier-3 exposure site after a person with COVID-19 attended the venue between 3.15pm and 4pm on June 7.

We have contacted health authorities for the official line on why the sites have been removed, but the common sense answer would be that the sites are no longer viewed as a risk to the community.