Victorian Chief Health Officer Brett Sutton said the state government would look to boost testing capacity in response to the sudden uptick in demand.
Testing sites across Melbourne have been swamped since this morning,with the Northern Hospital in Epping turning visitors away 20 minutes after opening.
Real estate agent Ashleigh Phillips took the day off work to go and get tested after both of her room mates were at the Highpoint exposure site during the hours a positive case was wandering through the shopping complex.
Even though the 20-year-old doesn’t have any symptoms,she wanted to pre-emptively get a test,but wasn’t expecting the wait at the Maidstone site to be so lengthy.
Ashleigh arrived at the site at around 10.20am,and she was still waiting when we last checked in with her about 2pm.
Professor Sutton said the long queues were an indication that people weren’t turning up to get tested when they were symptomatic in normal times.
“I hope that will change from now ... I’m sure we’ll stand up some more. Epping is obviously the hotspot here where we expect demand to be very high,but we’ll have to look at all the throughput from today and stand up more as required,” he said.
Asked to explain to Victorians how the state went from zero active community cases on Monday morning to nine cases 30 hours later,Professor Sutton said “well,it’s coronavirus”.
“You can be absolutely lucky with a single case who’s not particularly infectious. We’ve had that in Victoria,we’ve had that around Australia... You can be very unlucky with a case who is particularly infectious,has been to lots of places and transmits to lots of people.”
The virus spreading in Melbourne’s north is the Indian variant,B1617,which Professor Sutton said was “at least as infectious as any other variant of concern that’s been reported”.
But he was optimistic that restrictions beyond those announced on Tuesday morning would not be necessary in response to the four additional cases revealed in the afternoon.
“We’ll review,you know,with further information tonight and tomorrow,as we do every day. But at the moment,it just relates to four primary close contracts who’ve tested positive. We need to interview all of them and understand exactly where they’ve been,” he said.