Victoria’s Chief Medical Officer reveals how our hospitals are coping with COVID-19

Victoria’s Chief Medical Officer says the state’s healthcare system remains on top of the COVID-19 pandemic, and our hospitals have the capacity to deal with future outbreaks.

It comes after news yesterday that between 70 and 80 per cent of health workers with COVID-19 contracted it at work.

It’s a sharp rise from the earlier figure quoted by Safer Care Victoria, which claimed that only 10 per cent of health worker cases came from the workplace.

CMO Professor Andrew Wilson says the 10 per cent figure referred to the first wave of COVID-19, and that wave was very different.

“In the first wave … a lot of the workers had been infected from overseas travel,” he told Neil Mitchell.

“This wave … people have become infected at work.”

Professor Wilson says hospitals have ramped up protections for workers, including expanding the use of N95 masks, as new knowledge about the coronavirus has emerged.

He says hospitals have the resources necessary to cope with future outbreaks.

“We’ve got plenty of capacity in our hospital system and particularly in ICU, which is what we were worried about at the start of the year,” he told Neil Mitchell.

Press PLAY below for more.