Victoria makes ‘promising’ start to curtailing COVID-19 outbreak

Daniel Andrews admits he can’t yet guarantee Victoria’s snap lockdown will end as planned on Wednesday night.

But he says the state has made a “promising” start to curtailing the latest COVID-19 outbreak.

Just one new community case has been detected in the past 24 hours, a case that was already under investigation and linked to the social gathering on Sydney Road, Coburg, on February 6.

The Holiday Inn cluster is now at 17.

Daniel Andrews said Victoria had to “take this one hour and one day at a time”.

He said the fact cases were being detected outside of the “primary and secondary rings of contacts” had justified the decision to send the state into a circuit-breaking five-day lockdown.

“I think these last couple of days really do confirm for us that, as difficult as the call was on Friday, the advice that underpinned it was exactly the right call,” he said.

The woman who returned the latest positive test is asymptomatic and was swabbed four times, returning low positives and negative results.

(Photo by Luis Ascui/Getty Images)