Coronavirus Victoria: Senator calls outbreak 'Dan-made disaster' on Today show
A Queensland federal senator has taken aim at Daniel Andrews over his handling of the coronavirus outbreak in Victoria as health officials confirm a link between the Sydney outbreak and the Melbourne clusters.
Appearing on channel Nine’s Today show on Wednesday morning, Senator Matt Canavan bluntly told host Karl Stefanovic what he thinks about the way the state’s premier has handled the crisis.
“The second wave in Australia was certainly made in Melbourne, and it's a man-made disaster. It's a Dan-made disaster for our country that we have to respond to,” Senator Canavan said referring to Mr Andrews’ first name.
On Tuesday, Victoria reported 270 new coronavirus cases, a huge increase on the 177 new cases reported on Monday.
Meanwhile, an outbreak from a pub in Sydney’s southwest has been linked back to Melbourne, with Chief Health Officer Kerry Chant confirming a laboratory analysis has mapped four of the current NSW cases to Victoria, with a genomic sequence that “has not been seen before in NSW”.
NSW authorities have been left scrambling as they attempt to identify patient zero.
“If you don’t get to that one person and that creates a new strain and that pops up somewhere else in a month, that could also result in thousands of new cases,” Premier Gladys Berejiklian told media yesterday.
The Age reported on Tuesday that a leaked email warned the Victorian government of problems with its hotel quarantine that could lead to a spike in COVID-19 cases in the state.
It’s reported the first email was sent to several senior officials at the Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS) within 24 hours of the hotel quarantine program launch on March 28.
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The Age reports one of the emails sent by a senior bureaucrat at the Department of Jobs read: “We request that Victoria Police is present 24/7 at each hotel starting from this evening. We ask that DHHS urgently make that request as the control agency”.
The DHHS was also told to address the lack of PPE and clarify restrictions on people leaving hotel rooms or ordering food.
“This new virus has been imported from overseas and obviously come through the hotel route which had holes that you could drive a truck through, thanks to the ineptitude of the Victorian government,” Mr Canavan said on Today.
When Mr Andrews was asked about the leaked emails on Tuesday, he responded that it was not a matter for him “to determine or settle”.
“It’s a matter that should be not so much politicians sitting in judgment of themselves, but an arm’s-length inquiry that’s been set up and that will do its important work and report,” he said.
A judicial inquiry into the hotel quarantine bungle that saw guards infected with COVID-19 will begin on July 20.
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