Source: 9news.com.au
Victoria has recorded five new local cases of COVID-19 amid fears the virus may have seeped into an aged care facility.
The five infections take the cluster total to 45 as more than 43,000 people came forward for testing yesterday.
Labor frontbencher Bill Shorten this morning said he believes one or possibly two residents at an aged care home in Melbourne’s west have tested positive to coronavirus after a mystery case was identified in a worker.
The Arcare Maidstone aged care home is in Mr Shorten’s Melbourne electorate of Maribyrnong.
There are also reports of another positive case in a staff member at Blue Cross Western Gardens aged care in Sunshine.
According to 3AW, the worker tested negative on their last day of work but returned a positive result last night.
The mystery case in the Arcare Maidstone worker remains of “extreme concern” to health authorities who are scrambling to track down the source of the infection.
The aged care worker was tested immediately after developing symptoms, Victoria’s testing commander Jeroen Weimar confirmed yesterday.
“At this point in time this is the biggest priority for us to make sure we fully understand and wrap ourselves around both where the cases come from and where those chains are,” he said.
The Altona woman worked at the facility for two days while infectious, testing positive last Friday.
She had received one dose of the vaccine, but only a third of the staff at the Maidstone facility had been vaccinated under the Federal Government’s program, as well as more than half of the residents.
The aged care home has gone into a hard lockdown, with residents confined to their rooms as a testing blitz remains underway.
9News understands the worker’s infection has also prompted the Royal Freemasons Footscray and Coppin Centre facilities to go into lockdown after clinical staff worked at the same facility last week.
“For the safety of residents, staff and families we have initiated full COVID-19 outbreak procedures at both Coppin Centre and Footscray while we wait for the return of precautionary testing results,” a letter from CEO Kerri Rivett read.
“This means that all residents will be self-isolating in their rooms and staff are now wearing full personal protective equipment (PPE). Visitation is now restricted to those residents who are actively palliative.”
Chair of epidemiology at Deakin University Catherine Bennett told Today the case in the high-risk setting remained of concern.
“It is our worst fear – having someone not knowing they are infectious at work in aged care is exactly what you don’t want to happen,” she said.
Health authorities finding the missing link was among the factors necessary to prevent the lockdown from being extended, Professor Bennett said.”We are certainly looking for the links for that case,” she said.
“I think we are also looking to see increasingly if we are seeing cases – that they are going to be people who were quarantined when they had a negative test and are turning positive in quarantine.
“That’s the best news because it means even if we, unfortunately, have more cases, we are in a situation where we are not adding to that public exposure list.”
More than 270 locations have been added to a rapidly growing exposure site list.A number of shopping centres and stores have been added to the Tier One list requiring 14 days of self-isolation and testing, including Aldi at Sanctuary Lakes Shopping Centre, Big W in Craigieburn and Coles at Point Cook Shopping Centre.
The state’s largest shopping centre, Chadstone, along with Northland Shopping Centre on a Saturday afternoon and Sanctuary Lakes Shopping were added to the Tier Two list, urging anyone who attended the sites to get tested.
