Coronavirus live news: cases surge in Europe; Melbourne delays easing of restrictions
France, Italy, Austria and Greece report record increases in Covid-19 cases; Melbourne cluster grows. Follow the latest updates live
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A reporter said that NSW had been open for months with daily average cases hovering around 10. “If our contact tracing is as good as they are and we have as much faith in theVictorian community as the New SouthWales government has, why can’t we reopen?”
Andrews:
I don’t accept the conclusions you are drawing at all.... This is a pause, nothing more than that and it is appropriate that we wait to get those results. The reason we have literally hundreds of people locked in homes at the moment is because of the work that contact traces are doing, so I do not accept that criticism at all.
Of course people are frustrated and of course everyone would like these rules to come off as quickly as possible but we only get one chance to do this properly and we intend to wait for those results to come back from the laboratory. Oncethey have we will be able to make further judgement and then we will be able to update people tomorrow and hopefully make some announcements if not tomorrow then Tuesday and then push on from there.
Back to Victoria, where this press conference is still going on. Premier Daniel Andrews was asked to respond to his former health minister Jenny Mikakos’ comment that not going ahead with a planned easing of restrictions today was an example of “paralysis in decision making”. Andrews said:
I have nothing to say about those comments.
I have nothing to say about those comments because I have nothing to say about them. That is a choice I make and it does not make any sense to be interrogated on why I do not say anything.
There has not been a rollercoaster. Numbers have come down steadily and we are all about making sure we get them to the lowest level before we open up safely. But what I say to every Victorian is that people have given and done too much for us to ignore the fact that there are thousands of results that have been processed in laboratories as we speak and we need to wait and see those results, we will get them today and tomorrow and hopefully we are able to make, not only announcements but to take the big steps safely around the middle of this week ...
We cannot make decisions appropriate to the challenge if we do not have the results and we have not seen them. We don’t know what stories they will tell. Until we get that, which is today, tomorrow and potentially into Tuesday, it is just not safe and responsible for us to say we think we know better. We think that these will all be negative. And if there are some positives they will be linked to known cases. We cannot be certain.
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