BALLARAT COVID UPDATE: Friday, September 17
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NEW CASES: 3
ACTIVE CASES: 9
Ballarat has recorded three new COVID cases in the 24 hours up until midnight on Thursday.
There are now nine active cases across three different households in the city.
All three new cases are household contacts of existing cases and there are no new mystery cases in the city.
There were 2079 tests conducted in Ballarat yesterday.
COVID Commander Jeroen Weimar confirmed the Ballarat results on Friday morning, saying nine of the 510 new cases were in regional Victoria.
"I ask the community in Ballarat to continue to come forward and get tested," he said.
"Please check exposure sites. Some of those active cases have been particularly dynamic over the last couple of weeks during our infectious period.
"Again, my thanks to the entire local team that's down there, particularly the City of Ballarat and Ballarat Health for their fantastic efforts in the last 48 hours.
"We expect a busy few days ahead as we work through testing anybody who has symptoms and has been to exposure sites and anyone who has concern about their potential exposure."
Mr Weimar asked why Geelong was not in lockdown, even though there are more cases there than Ballarat.
There are 13 active cases in Geelong compared to Ballarat's nine.
See where all the exposure sites are here.
"The issue with Geelong is we have clearly identified sources of acquisition," he said.
"There's a bit of work to do in one case in today's numbers and we'll be interested to see where that transmission came from. (Generally speaking), primary close contacts are defined, they're isolating, we don't have waste water pinging where we don't expect it to ping in the Geelong area so it's a risks we can just about manage at this point in time.
"What worried us significantly in Ballarat two or three days ago was a number of waste water catchments activated at the same time. A new unlinked positive case came forward who was infectious in the community for over 10 days and with a large number of exposure sites around them. The results for Ballarat in the last 24 hours are, I would say, encouraging."
About 95 per cent of the new cases are in Melbourne's north and west.
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