Only 50% of COVID cases notified within 24 hours during Victoria’s second wave

A number of aged care providers raised concerns at the height of the second wave about delays in testing and the resulting effect on containing outbreaks – now new data has revealed the true impact.

Just half of Victoria’s confirmed coronavirus cases were notified as being positive within the 24-hour benchmark considered best practice, according to evidence to a Victorian parliamentary inquiry this week.

Head of contact tracing, Jeroen Weimar, presented data from the Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS) which showed only 50.6% of those who tested positive in July met the benchmark, leading to delays in isolating close contacts.

“Back in July, about half the tests were taking longer than a day for people to get their results and certainly we saw with some of our labs, you know, certainly test results taking two, three, four days, sometimes to come back,” he said.

The data revealed that by August as cases peaked, 77.6% of cases were notified within a day – but that is still almost a quarter of infected Victorians not receiving their results within 24 hours.

Today, the rate is sitting at 96% with around half returning a result within 12 hours.

Chief Health Officer, Dr Brett Sutton admitted that the system had become “overwhelmed” at 200 cases a day, with each case averaging 10 contacts or around 2,000 people in total who would need to be notified.

“When you get to hundreds of cases, at that kind of level of 200 or more cases per day, it starts to really challenge your ability to get to all of that timely information for close contacts within that critical time period,” he said.

The DHHS says it now has the ability to handle 500 new cases a day.

Victoria has now recorded 26 days without a new case of COVID.