2 June 2021

Dear colleagues,

Today the Victorian government announced that their lockdown would be extended across Greater Melbourne for at least another week, while restrictions will ease across regional Victoria. However, for now, all of Victoria remains a declared COVID-19 hotspot. This means that our response in Queensland remains the same for now.

To be clear, this means that the border restrictions and visitor restrictions to relevant facilities will continue. Anyone who has been in Victoria in the last 14 days will require an exemption to enter any of our facilities.

Please continue to monitor the Queensland Health list of interstate exposure venues as there are now over 320 identified locations.

New South Wales new exposure sites

We now know that a confirmed case of COVID-19 from Melbourne was in Goulburn, Jervis Bay, Hyams Beach and Vincentia while potentially infectious on 23 and 24 May.

If you have been to an exposure site from NSW you will be required to quarantine at an appropriate location as per the Interstate Exposure Venues Direction (No. 2). Please review the list of exposure sites if you have recently been to NSW.

Exemption applications

We know these recent events has had an impact on our workforce across Metro North, as it has across all other health services in Queensland. There are a number of our staff that were in Melbourne or greater Victoria over the past two weeks and are currently unable to come to work.

I would like to remind everyone to be patient and respectful as the relevant authorities work through the exemption applications as quickly as they can. They have received hundreds of applications from across the state from health workers, as well as the usual quarantine exemption applications they receive (which also increase markedly when there are domestic border restrictions).

Please contact your local EOC if you require an update on the status of your application and remember to continue living our Metro North values as we all work through this together.

Vaccination Update

You may be aware that the current situation, together with the increased availability of Pfizer vaccine has seen a surge in demand for vaccination. In response, our vaccination teams have gone into ‘overdrive’, delivering almost 2000 vaccines yesterday.

In response, our teams are working to expand vaccination clinic hours, and will be supporting vaccinations this Saturday. A big thankyou to our vaccination teams for being so responsive and proactive.

Please be sure to invite your household contacts to take advantage of vaccination if they would like to be vaccinated. Just ask them to visit our vaccination page, register their interest and follow the detailed instructions.

Kind regards,

Dr Liz Rushbrook
Metro North Incident Controller

Metro North HHS – overview of cases*

* As at 2/06/2021 1000
** Metro North has four recorded deaths (one person a return traveller into NSW, who passed away in NSW)
*** These numbers reflect the cases being managed by Metro North.