Victorians have been warned to be prepared for cases to rise again over the next months as thousands of children return to school.
The announcement was made by Health Minister Martin Foley on Tuesday morning, after the state recorded another 14,836 new cases and 29 Covid deaths.
“While things have stabilised, they’ve stabilised at quite high level and we expect to see continued pressure on our health system for some time to come,” he said.
“Once school goes back we will expect to see a bit of an uptick in cases. We just want to make the community be aware and prepared.”
“More importantly, as we all come to coexist with Covid, we all understand the different options should Covid come our way.”
Mr Foley also detailed how much pressure the health system remained under, with thousands of frontline workers still out of action due to isolation requirements.
“The notion that we’re out of this is well and truly premature, our health system continues to operate under extremely trying circumstances,” he said.
“Our healthcare staff are working under pressure like never before.”
There are now 1057 infected people in Victorian hospitals, with 119 in intensive care and 45 on ventilators.
Victoria’s pre-Omicron peak for Covid hospitalisations was 851 in October when the state was battling a surge in Delta infections.
However, the figure is dwarfed by the 2943 people in NSW who are in hospital with Covid.
More than 93 per cent of eligible Victorians are fully vaccinated and the state has a mammoth 183,154 active cases.
A total of 30,726 PCR tests were taken on Wednesday and 27,908 vaccines were administered at state hubs.
It comes amid a mass recruitment blitz is set to put a stop to part of Victoria’s supply chain crisis, with hundreds of workers needed across the state’s superxjmtzywmarkets.
Premier Daniel Andrews made the announcement on Monday morning, with state-run Jobs Victoria recruiting people for roles including shelf stacking and distribution.
More than 2000 people have already expressed interest in the program.
Coles’ executive manager of central operations, Kevin Gunn, said the scheme would help ease Omicron-induced supply issues.
“Every part of the food supply chain has seen increased numbers of staff isolating, from farmers, food processors and the transport sector to our distribution centres and stores,” he said.
“The end result has been fewer products available for customers.”
Mr Andrews also acknowledged more vaccine doses were administered over the weekend than any other since October.
“It’s the biggest weekend we’ve had in many months,” he said.
“That growth is steady, it’s great, but we have to do more and we have to do better.”
