How Hume became the centre of Victoria’s Delta outbreak

By last Friday, there were 1,646 cases in the City of Hume, more than a third of all infections in Melbourne. Meanwhile vaccination rates are among the lowest in the state. Community leaders are heartened by the recent surge in vaccinations, but they are frustrated too, saying their warnings were not taken seriously until it was too late.

“We have been for some time calling for extra resources,” says the 33-year-old mayor of Hume, Joseph Haweil. “We know the demographics of this area,” Haweil continues. “Very large families, lower socio-economic conditions, a workforce that does the heavy lifting for the state, the people who actually work in the factories, who do logistics, who deal with warehousing, who run small businesses and keep things running, while people like me and many others can work from home.

A massive, diverse community

Hume is massive geographically and in population. With 240,000 residents, it’s on par with the city of Geelong. The council area stretches north-west to the semi-rural Sunbury to Broadmeadows in the south, once a manufacturing powerhouse. Ironically given complaints about vaccine access here, the CSL plant where the AstraZeneca vaccine is produced is in Broady.

Shopping centre at Craigieburn

The latest outbreak is centred in Craigieburn and Roxburgh Park, where there are 811 active cases. These suburbs are home to sprawling housing estates, and most agree infrastructure and services have struggled to keep pace with rapid growth. There are large multicultural communities in Hume, many new arrivals, and English proficiency is below the city average.

A lack of access to vaccines

Dr Umber Rind runs a GP clinic in the Hume suburb of Campbellfield, where there are currently 143 active cases.

Rind’s clinic is one of several forced to close as an exposure site, stopping vaccinations and depriving residents of care. Rind requested access to administer Pfizer doses at the start of the rollout, but her clinic is yet to receive a single dose.

Dr Umber Rind

“On Friday we missed our [first] Pfizer delivery because our clinic was closed as a tier 1 site,” she says. “Now we’re still waiting for it to be redelivered.”

The Age reported on the weekend that while 2,370 Pfizer doses were sent to Hume the previous week, more affluent council areas such as Boroondara, Whitehorse, Monash and Stonnington had each received more doses over the same period. It is true these areas also have more GP clinics, but they also have only a few dozen cases between them. On Friday, Hume added another 132 infections to its total.

Rind’s patients are diverse: Lebanese, Turkish, Italians and Greeks, and “a lot of people from a low socio-economic background.”

“I felt it was inequality,” says Rind. “I knew in the eastern suburbs, people were going to their GP clinics for Pfizer. Why did our clinics not have Pfizer and in the affluent suburbs Pfizer was freely available?”

“Until a week ago, we only had eight general practices in Hume administering Pfizer,” says Haweil. “And this is a municipality where the average age is 33.”

This week, Victoria reached a milestone of 70% of first doses administered. On Monday, the rate in Hume was growing quickly, but still only 55%. In Boroondara, home to Josh Frydenberg’s blue-riband Liberal seat of Kooyong, 74.9% of first doses have been administered. Supply is the main problem, according to Haweil and Rind, but they both also acknowledge vaccine hesitancy among some locals, particularly about the AstraZenca vaccine.

North western melbourne covid vaccination centre

“Things like Clive Palmer distributing pamphlets in some of the hardest-hit suburbs which questioned the efficacy of the vaccine has not helped,” Haweil says. “This is more than four or five months ago. Huge rounds of letterboxing with those flyers. That’s before Craig Kelly came into the equation.”

“It’s from the news and from the media, and it’s also conspiracy theories online,” says Rind. “They’ve seen all of that and now are terrified. For some of them it’s very hard to convince them. Others, the outbreak has changed their mind.”

As daily case numbers in Hume rose from dozens to hundreds, the Victorian government established a drive-through vaccination clinic at the old Ford factory in Broadmeadows. More recently, it created a new walk-in, pop-up clinic at the urging of the council.