The return to Stage Three restrictions for 10 postcodes in Victoria, and 66 new cases of COVID-19 recorded on Friday morning, has speculators scrambling to find a scapegoat.
Accusations are flying high with Victoria’s Opposition leader Michael O’Brien calling for Victorian Health Minister Jenny Mikakos to be sacked amid a blame game which has erupted following the “botched” quarantine hotel breaches. Others are looking at the multi-ethnic density of the suburbs themselves.
In a press conference on Friday, Minister Mikakos said she has sought her own explanations.
“I wanted to know what had gone wrong,” she said, adding that she has received a briefing of a genomic sequencing report that seemed to suggest that “there seems to be a single source of infection for many of the cases that have gone across the northern and western suburbs of Melbourne”.
“It appears to be even potentially a super spreader that has caused this upsurge in cases,” she said. A “super spreader” is someone capable of spreading the virus more rapidly to more people than others.
She supports the judicial inquiry taking place regarding Victoria’s hotel quarantine program though her department was not involved in the process.
“I can say it is not my department,” she said.
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“All these questions will be examined thoroughly by the inquiry because employers had contractual obligations to provide training and PPE to their staff. We went above and beyond providing PPE to these hotels,” she said.
The role of Multiethnic communities
Victoria’s Chief Health Officer Brett Sutton speculated on the role of multiethnic communities in the run-up to Melbourne’s recent spike in cases. Last week, he said, “We know that there are some migrant communities, recent migrants or culturally and linguistically diverse communities, who are overrepresented now with some of our new cases […] It’s our obligation as government to reach those people. It’s not their fault if we’re not going in with appropriate engagement.”
Federal Health Minister Greg Hunt, meeting with Melbourne’s multicultural media outlets on Thursday, addressed speculation that the shutting down of areas with high multi-ethnic density may have been the result of the culture of the communities themselves.
“I really want to dispel the myth that has emerged that it may in some way be related to particular cultural practices. It swept through, initially, parts of the city of Stonningham, in Toorak and South Yarra, and it was in north-western Tasmania,” he said in response to a question by Neos Kosmos.
“It will work through the community on the basis of one thing alone- transmission from one individual to another
“What we have seen at different times is there have been weddings in the Barossa Valley where there were outbreaks, there was the NW Tasmanian case and that’s a community with a relatively low level of people from non-English speaking backgrounds.”
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He added that “it just so happened that because of the hotel quarantine breaches, where some of those people were linked, that it went back into that community and then it spread.”
Minister Hunt also pinpointed the Black Lives Matter protest. “I think it came at the same time as many Victorians looked at protests and said, ‘gosh, if it’s okay for 10,000 people to huddle together, then surely it’s okay for 10’. The real truth is that it is never okay for 10,000 people to huddle together.”
Announcing that information is being made available in five new languages, he pinpointed the government’s efforts to make multicultural communities more aware of the dangers.
“We are continually upgrading,” he said, in reference to radio advertisements in 29 languages, newspaper advertisements and factsheets in over 63 languages (with more than 850,000 views) as well as “people on the ground talking to people in different languages”.
Despite the government’s “upgrades” there are those who believe more could be done.
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“The main message from the health community has not reached multilingual communities efficiently,” Dr Vasso Apostolopoulos told Neos Kosmos, adding that there is plenty of misinformation circulating around non-English speaking communities which get much information from social media. She said many still believe it is “fake”, and Minister Mikakos confirmed this earlier this week when she said that over 10,000 people had refused testing during the suburban blitz period- a number of them citing conspiracy theories as the reason why.