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.
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Victorians will be locked down for the fourth time from midnight on Thursday as health authorities scramble to track down thousands of contacts of COVID-19 cases and the number of exposure sites in the state soared past 150.
The seven-day lockdown was called as the number of locally transmitted cases in the state doubled to 26 in just over 24 hours, though they can all be linked back to a Wollert man who contracted the virus in hotel quarantine in Adelaide.
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The health department is tracking down at least 10,000 primary and secondary contacts of cases who are required to isolate, while one case is in intensive care.
Quarantine breach likely due to airborne transmission27/05/2021|2min
Victorian Chief Health Officer Brett Sutton says his understanding is South Australia’s hotel quarantine breach occurred via airborne transmission through the corridor.
Mr Sutton said it was something which had been seen “too many times” and was “a lesson for hotel quarantine across the board”.
“That is something we have tried to mitigate in Victoria as much as possible with filtered air purifiers in corridors with a minimum standard of negative pressure to drive air back into rooms,” he said.
He said people leaving SA hotel quarantine have been prompted by authorities to get an additional test on day 17 and the individual in question would likely have received this prompt.