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Victoria’s daily coronavirus numbers are in.
The state has recorded 1838 new, locally acquired cases of COVID-19 and five deaths. That’s Victoria’s second national record for daily cases in a single week (there were 1763 cases reported on Tuesday).
The Department of Health has not said how many cases are linked to known outbreaks or how many people were already isolating when they tested positive.
Zero cases were detected in hotel quarantine.
There are now 16,823 active cases of coronavirus across the state.
Today’s numbers are off the back of yesterday’s record 77,554 coronavirus tests.
Less than 70 per cent of Victoria’s triple zero calls are being answered within five seconds and some are being left on hold for 13 minutes while waiting for assistance, according to the head of the service which takes emergency calls.
Emergency Services Telecommunications Authority CEO Marty Smyth has confirmed two people in Melbourne have died from cardiac arrest after waiting around five minutes each for their triple zero calls to be answered.
A key performance indicator for the service is that 90 per cent of calls are answered in five seconds, but Mr Smyth said less than 70 per cent are being picked up recently and it’s “even lower on some days”.
“We can’t say that someone’s died because of the delay in the calls because only the coroner can relay the cause of death, but regrettably, yes, there have been delays and answering calls,” the ESTA CEO told radio station 3AW.
“Last year we were looking at probably 2000-2400 calls a day. This year, in the last couple of weeks in particular, we’re exceeding 3000 calls a day.
“I found one [call wait] the other day that was about 13 minutes, and then we had a couple of calls that lasted even longer than that … Fortunately, they didn’t [lead to catastrophic results].
“We found that about 40 per cent of calls don’t actually need an ambulance … so we’re absolutely asking Victoria to consider only calling triple zero if it’s an emergency.”
Mr Smyth said today’s announcement that former Victoria Police chief Graham Ashton will conduct a review into ESTA had been in the works for some time and was a “standard process” which began last week.
