Senior Victorian nurses Jacqui Harper and Michelle Spence.Credit:Paul Jeffers
Jacqui Harper,a nurse unit manager at the Northern Hospital,said:“COVID is real,it’s affecting younger and younger age groups,and it’s scary.”
“COVID-19 is a terrible illness,the patients we see coming into our hospitals are seriously,seriously ill,” she said.
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“The clinical deterioration is so sad. One minute sitting in a chair. An hour later,they could be saying their goodbyes.”
A man in his 50s,a woman in her 70s and a man in his 80s are the latest Victorians to die from COVID-19. The state recorded 1220 new cases on Sunday.
Ms Spence said health authorities were considering flying Queensland nurses in to assist the state’s stretched healthcare workforce and that there was a “staged plan” to open more intensive care beds as they were needed.
Allied health workers at Royal Melbourne Hospital are also now helping to “prone” COVID-19 patients in order to take pressure off nurses,while more experienced nurses are being taken off vaccination clinics and placed into virus wards,Ms Spence said.
“There are things that are coming out of the woodwork that we would never have done before,but there is a need to do it,” he said. “This is hopefully a once-in-a-lifetime pandemic.”
Ms Spence said she believed the time between opening up at the end of October and Christmas was going to be the “toughest time” for Victorian nurses.
Premier Daniel Andrews said that of the 476 people currently being treated in Victorians hospitals for coronavirus,just 5 per cent were fully vaccinated. He said 98 were in intensive care and 57 on a ventilator.
Mr Andrews said the 71,275 tests returned on Saturday was a record for the state “by a few dozen”.
“It’s critical towards knowing where this virus is and where it isn’t,for contact tracing trying to look through those chains of transmission,” he said.
“So keeping those testing numbers as high as possible – people acting on their symptoms and getting tested as soon as they register those symptoms – has never been more important.”
Premier Daniel Andrews on Sunday.Credit:Paul Jeffers
He noted that from Monday,the dose interval for Pfizer would be revised down from six weeks between jabs to three weeks.
Around 51.9 per cent of the eligible population in the state have now received two doses of the vaccine.
Victoria now has 11,785 active cases.
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A childcare centre in Melbourne’s south-eastwas listed on Saturday night as Victoria’s latest tier-1 exposure site,along with a hotel in Melbourne’s inner north and a regional gym.
The Clarendon Street Community Child Care Centre in Cranbourne was listed as an exposure site on September 27,forcing a number of staff,children and potentially parents into isolation for 14 days.
Total Body Fit 24/7 in Kialla,just south of Shepparton in Victoria’s north,is considered a tier-1 exposure between September 27 to September 29,while the Quality Hotel in Carlton,in Melbourne’s inner north,was attended by a COVID-positive person from September 27 to September 29.
South Morang’s My Chemist in Westfield Plenty Valley was visited by a positive case on September 23 to September 25. The sign-writing store Amari Visual Solutions in Tullamarine has also been listed as a tier-1 exposure on September 27.
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