It’s the largest daily caseload for the state and the largest jump in daily cases in Australia since the pandemic began.
It comes after Victoria reported 950 new infections on Wednesday.
Victoria’s COVID-19 response commander Jeroen Weimar said parties held to celebrate the AFL Grand Final have “generated a significant caseload”.
“The contact tracers tell us that there have been significant numbers of social gatherings on Friday and Saturday, over a long weekend – Grand Final parties, other social gatherings, barbecues, backyard visits,” he said.
“This has generated significant caseload. A third of our cases are due directly to those different types of social gatherings, as people have dropped their guard, and decided now it’s the Grand Final weekend, it’s the long weekend, we deserve a bit of a payback, we deserve a nicer time.
“And that has now translated into additional 500 cases from when we expected to see today.”
Victorian premier Daniel Andrews said many of the cases “were completely avoidable”.
“Now, of course, they will add further pressure to our health system and they will lead to more people being seriously ill,” he said.
“I know it‘s frustrating. I know it’s incredibly hard. I know this has been literally the longest journey, but we can see to the other side now and that’s why it’s so important that we just find it in ourselves to do the right thing.”
However, the premier said it won’t affect Victoria’s plans to reopen yet because “it’s only one day”.
“It’s not about one day – if you get this each day, every day of the week, you’re putting avoidable pressure on all sorts of different systems, most notably our public hospital system,” he said.
