If the fear of a second wave keeps you up at night like it does Chief Medical Officer Brendan Murphy, you might be feeling a little unsettled by the recent spike in cases.
In the past 24 hours, the World Health Organisation reported the largest single-day increase with over 183,000 new coronavirus cases.
In Australia, 18 new cases were recorded overnight, and health officials have identified 6 different coronavirus hotspots in Victoria.
Amid this virus spike, some people have taken to Twitter and attempted to blame the Black Lives Matter protests that started on these shores over a fortnight ago.
One user, Netz Melbourne claimed, “Daniel Andrews has been slammed by medical experts around Australia for allowing 10,000 people to protest at #BlackLivesMatter rally on 6th June. Not only did it increase community transmission, but it encouraged other Victorians to ignore Covid-19 precautions.”
However, Health officials across the country are yet to trace a single coronavirus case to the Black Lives Matter protests that took place over 14 days ago.
This morning, CMO Brendan Murphy told ABC News that the experts did not believe the rallies were directly responsible for any new cases.
“Whilst three of the protesters in Victoria did test positive, we don’t think they transmitted or got it at the protest,” he said.
The absence of positive transmissions from the BLM rallies led to Arrernte writer, Celeste Liddle, on Sunday night tweeting at the media and asking if it planned to report on it as actively as the unfounded concerns about new outbreaks potentially resulting from the protests.
CMO Brendan Murphy said his concerns around the protests are “that it led to people who were doing the right thing about avoiding gatherings feeling a bit like others were breaking the rules so they could too.”
This comes as QLD Minister for Sport Mick de Brenni said reopening stadiums is “a reward to Queenslanders for all their effort”.
In the same press conference, QLD Health Minister Steven Miles warned against future protests.
“Now is not the time to do that, now is the time to put the health of our community first.”
However, Mr Miles also acknowledged, “we can now say that having seen more than two weeks pass since that rally, we don’t believe anyone contracted coronavirus at the rally.”
“In fact, we don’t believe anyone at the rally had the virus. We were very fortunate that QLD and Brisbane in particular was at a very low level of cases at the time the rally occurred.”
Twitter user, Troy Simpson asked, “Is it safe to say yet that the black lives matter rallies in Australia two weeks ago have NOT caused a second Covid wave?”
