Yahoo Finance Victoria Covid update: vaccination to be compulsory for teachers as state records 628 new cases
Victorian teachers and childcare workers face compulsory Covid-19 vaccinations before they return to work next month, as cases continue to rise across the state.
The deputy premier and education minister, James Merlino, announced on Wednesday that all staff at schools and childcare services will need to have their first vaccination by 18 October or have a booking within a week of that date.
All will need to be fully vaccinated by 29 November. Government school staff will be entitled to a half-day of paid time off in order to attend a vaccination appointment.
“Anyone who works on-site at schools or early childhood settings, they will not be able to work on site if they are not vaccinated,” Merlino said. He said a survey of 33,000 teachers found 75% were already fully vaccinated.
Related: Victoria Covid restrictions: Melbourne lockdown, curfew and regional Vic coronavirus rules explained
Many Victorian school students have not been in the classroom since July. Most in Melbourne haven’t had an uninterrupted school term since late 2019.
Year 12 students will return to face-to-face learning on 5 October, with other year levels returning, on a staggered timetable, starting with prep to year 2 on 18 October.
The remaining year levels will be able to return from 26 October but only year 7 and year 11 students will be able to attend five days a week.
The chief health officer, Brett Sutton, said making vaccination a compulsory condition of employment in schools would not only protect students, but help stop the spread throughout the community.
“The return to school means we have to do everything we reasonably can to protect children, teachers, carers and their families from Covid-19 transmission. That means vaccination, ventilation and virus detection,” Sutton said.
Victoria’s largest childcare provider, Goodstart Early Learning, which runs 180 centres across the state attended by more than 20,000 children, has backed the government vaccine mandate.
“With children under five unable to be vaccinated, the best way to keep them safe is to vaccinate the adults around them,” state manager Paul Ryan said.
“Experience from interstate and overseas shows that as vaccination rates rise, Covid becomes a pandemic of the unvaccinated. While children are at low risk of serious infection, we should do everything we can to keep that risk as low as possible.
“Mandating vaccination of educators will significantly reduce the risk of transmission of Covid in centres as Victoria starts to open up, and is sensible and prudent.”
But making vaccination compulsory, and a condition of employment, has proven controversial for the Victorian government.
Melbourne has been seized by roiling, violent protests this week, which had their genesis in the government mandating vaccinations for workers in the construction industry.
Victoria recorded 628 new locally acquired cases of coronavirus on Wednesday, a new record for the 2021 outbreak. Three people have died with the virus.
There are currently 257 people in Victorian hospitals with Covid-19: 58 of those are in intensive care, and 37 require a ventilator to breathe.
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More than half – 57% – of the newly reported cases were in the northern suburbs of metropolitan Melbourne, including 194 cases in Hume and 80 cases in Whittlesea.
Lockdown orders will be lifted in Ballarat from midnight Wednesday, after seven days of the restrictions.
But for the fourth time in a fortnight, the waiting room at Dandenong hospital’s emergency department has been listed as a tier one exposure site.
An infected person attended the waiting room for just over two hours from 1pm on Monday 20 September.
Meanwhile, Western Australia’s health minister, Roger Cook, announced on Wednesday a truck driver who tested positive to Covid had travelled from NSW to Perth.
Cook said contact tracing was still underway. He said two drivers were understood to have left NSW on 13 September and to have stayed in WA for two days – on 16 and 17 September – sleeping in their truck and wearing masks at all times.
The WA police commissioner, Chris Dawson, said there would be no changes to the border or internal movement restrictions, yet.
