The founder of an iconic Australian landscaping company has slammed the Victorian government s repeated lockdowns for destroying his industry, as he calls for tradies to be able to work outside.
Jim Penman, owner of Jim s Mowing, told Sunrise on Tuesday morning that close to 1,000 employees are unable to work despite being outdoors and as sole-operators, which he says breaks the government s own Covid-safe guidelines.
Some employees have become suicidal as they struggle with the lockdown, he explained, and others have seen the stress ending their marriages, something he said proves snap lockdowns need to end. I had two franchisees who lost their homes and their marriages last year, and two more had suicide attempts in their families, he told the morning show.
There are emerging signs Melbourne’s lockdown is suppressing transmission and quelling its COVID-19 outbreak. But experts are divided on the need for a longer lockdown.
People exercise in Melbourne on Tuesday, the fifth day of a seven-day lockdown.
Photo: AFP
Chief Health Officer Brett Sutton said on Tuesday night that the virus was moving faster than any other strain we ve dealt with . We re seeing transmissions in settings and circumstances we ve never seen before, he said.
His comments came as a new positive case was identified in a Victorian who had travelled to New South Wales and back again, prompting a whole raft of new exposure sites.
For the first time, health officials have seen four or five cases where people were infected by strangers by casual contacts.
The likelihood of Victorians being kept in their choking lockdown for a second week - or longer - will not depend on the number of new cases, but whether they are linked to already known cases or from mystery sources.
The number of cases in the state rose to 51 on Monday after 11 new local infections were confirmed.
Contact tracers are scrambling to identify about 4,200 close contacts and 279 exposure sites as the end of lockdown looms on Thursday.
Victoria s chief health officer Brett Sutton described the virus as an absolute beast and that authorities were neck and neck with it in the fight to trace cases and control its spread by Friday, or concede defeat and go for another long, hard lockdown.