Thread by @DrEricDing

BREAKING—Victoria🇦🇺 extends lockdown. Worse, Chief health officer Brett Sutton says cases now infected in ways “not seen before”. 📌One person infected at an indoor space “2 hours after infectious case had left” &📌another case in outdoor dining.🧵#COVID19
news.com.au/national/victo…

2) “(It) was therefore a substantial period of time but they had left two hours before the next exposed individual came in who has become a case.”
“That’s in the kind of measles category of infectiousness.” ⚠️

3) “It may be on surfaces but it could absolutely be through airborne transmission as well because of that indoor setting.”

4) Professor Sutton said there was another case where the virus had showed up “in places where normally it would be likely”.

“So the Brighton Beach Hotel, that was an outdoor dining setting, well ventilated, you wouldn’t expect transmission to occur,” he said. 👀

5) “We still had it as an exposure site, we still informed people to test and isolate until returning a negative, but in fact all of those people will need to be in quarantine because transmission has occurred there…”

6) “That’s not something that we routinely see and we didn’t routinely see it in 2020, but we have to bear in mind that all the variants of concern now are really a step up to some degree.

7) “This variant is not the most infectious, but it is more infectious than anything we saw in the beginning and middle of 2020, so we have to bear that in mind.”

8) He said at least one in 10 current cases in the 60-case cluster “caught this virus in those casual contact settings” outside the workplace or home.

➡️Victorian authorities say people are becoming infected with covid after just “brushing past” strangers with the virus.

9) Testing Commander said at least 4 of the state’s 54 locally transmitted cases have come from “fleeting” contact...
“What we’re seeing now is people are brushing past each other in a small shop, they are going to a display home, they are looking at photos in a shop”

10) Victoria is having many #B16172 variant cases. This “more airborne” phenomenon is also seen in Vietnam recently, in which new sister variants “spread quickly by air”. See thread of the new variant identified by Vietnam 🇻🇳 Health Ministry.

https://twitter.com/drericding/status/1398631148927004675

11) While not surprising for indoor, the outdoor transmission in outdoor dining setting is intriguing. But we know the virus can stay afloat for many hours. Many aerosol study indicates that coronavirus is persistent and stable for many hours. #COVID19

12) It is high time for world leaders and every minister of health and hospital director to now demand premium PPEs and advanced airborne precautions for all healthcare workers. The new virus variants are more contagious than ever. And #COVIDisAirborne damnit.

https://twitter.com/pmgpsc/status/1357471366342078464

13) This statement from the Acting Premier of Victoria is sobering… not just 1 in 10 cases caught #COVID19 from a stranger, but that “brushing against each other” & “being in the same time for mere moments” have led to infections! That’s damn serious.

premier.vic.gov.au/statement-acti…

14) As I’ve said before, “Until we recognise that #COVID19 is airborne we are setting ourselves up for repeated failure”

15) VENTILATION is key. Both ventilation and masks needed to reduce risk indoors. But most buildings simply not ventilated well enough.

16) Update, the outdoor dining case at the Brighton Beach Hotel has now been declared a false positive. Which makes more sense.

https://twitter.com/vicgovdh/status/1400360441243738115