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The Melburnians are in the second week of the lockdown and are anxiously awaiting the end of Thursday-but the authorities need to look at one thing before approving.
Today’s two unrelated cases are from a mutated Delta strain, a variant that is about 50% more infectious than a typical new coronavirus.
Chief Medical Officer Professor Brett Sutton told reporters today that the contact tracers do not know the source of the delta outbreak, but the authorities are still confident that the restrictions will be relaxed next week.
He said: “If we only have those downstream cases and nothing else appears, I believe that the pillars of the public health response, contact tracing and the control loop we implemented, we will handle this matter.”
“This is a challenge. The spreadability. The second attack rate is 50% higher than that of the Alpha variant. It does mean that you can get a large number of people to test positive and you can spread more easily in other environments. But we can still manage all of these.”
related: Victoria’s lockdown continues as five new cases have been recorded
related: Anti-vaccine protesters arrested in Melbourne
Testing commander Jeroen Weimar said that public health authorities are still trying to control the delta outbreak, but they quickly “built a ring” around it.
Mr. Weimar said that the rapid response to the delta epidemic gave him full confidence, “We will see all this being implemented soon.”
“We recognize that by extending the blockade in Melbourne, those days are really expensive. The entire Melbourne community has paid a price these days to ensure that we are indeed confident that we can make difficult decisions in the coming days,” he Say.
Professor Sutton said that even if the delta case in the middle of next week is a mystery, it will not necessarily stop the discussion around ending the blockade.
“We just need to know every possible case,” he said.
“I think this is controllable and it will not affect our decision later this week, but we must be very clear that we need to find any existing cases.”
Victorian Health Minister Martin Foley said that the discussion about ending the blockade was not straightforward.
“As we approach next Thursday, the facts we have experienced here are evidence, what cases are outside, whether other people are in contact or not, whether we have their support, whether we have evidence… .As for knowing where they are from,” he said.
Mr. Foley said the authorities are also looking for any upstream or downstream outbreaks.
“All these issues are intertwined. Don’t worry, people of Victoria, we don’t want to keep the system in place longer than the public health advice says we need it in place,” he said.
“In the next few days, we will have more to say about this.”
Why is Delta’s contingency situation so concerning?
B. 1.617.2, also called Delta strain, is The same strain of coronavirus that destroyed India.
This is also a major cause of concern in the UK.
American epidemiologist Eric Feighl-Ding explained that the Delta variant is 50-70% more infectious, and the patient is 2.7 times more likely to be hospitalized than the other variants.
He said that about 75% of all cases in the UK are Delta variants.
Professor Sharon Lewin from the Doherty Institute told ABC News This morning, people were worried about the “Kappa” mutation-this mutation also appeared in India, which was attacked by Covid.
Professor Lewin said that both are more “infectious” than British variant “Alpha”.
“Delta variantThe new cluster reported yesterday is dominant in the UK and they have been infected with a bit of Kappa virus,” she said.
“The data from that country is very good, and the genome is sequenced very frequently. We do know that both of these variants are more contagious than the British variants and are now called Alpha variants.
“It is estimated that they may be twice as infectious. Therefore, for everyone who can be infected by one person-before two people-they are now twice as likely to be infected.”
She added that the current severity of the disease is “not very clear” and is currently based on anecdotal reports.
“You really need some very systematic data collection to prove the severity of the disease. I’m not sure if we have seen it.”
“But the same measures are still effective, which means-testing, tracking, quarantine, masks-all the usual measures we use to stop transmission are still effective here,” Professor Lewin said.
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