Victoria has recorded five new local cases of coronavirus as authorities scramble to figure out how a family that travelled to NSW contracted the highly contagious Delta variant of the virus.
The Delta variant cluster is now at nine cases, Victoria's COVID-19 response commander Jeroen Weimar said on Saturday.
It remains unclear how those family members, who also travelled to Jervis Bay in NSW, contracted the variant.Sharon Lewin, an infectious disease expert from the Doherty Institute, said on Saturday she had a “strong hypothesis” the Delta variant arrived in Victoria via hotel quarantine. The family from Melbourne's west has more than 300 close contacts, many of them at North Melbourne Primary School, and authorities suspect there has been transmission between two grade five students at the school.
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