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Victoria has recorded 221 new cases of COVID-19 as Premier Daniel Andrews asks for more Pfizer shots to balance out the extra doses provided to New South Wales over the past seven months.
Of the new cases, 98 have so far been linked to existing cases and clusters, while investigations continue into the source of the remaining 123 cases.
It is not yet known how many of the cases were in the community while infectious.
There are now 1920 active cases in the state after 42,429 test results were received in the past 24 hours.
There were also 36,716 vaccine doses provided on Tuesday, after Mr Andrews said 61.4 per cent of Victorians had received at least one dose of a vaccine.
The number of COVID-19 cases follows consecutive days of 246 new cases on both Monday and Tuesday, the highest daily caseloads recorded in Victoria since August last year.
On Tuesday, there were 110 people in hospital, including a 17-year-old teenager on a ventilator.
Meanwhile, a nurse working in hotel quarantine in Victoria has tested positive to COVID-19 and a case has been detected at Cheltenham Primary School.
Mr Andrews on Tuesday lashed the federal government for handing NSW more Pfizer vaccines than its share of the population, saying: “I signed up to a national plan to vaccinate our nation, not a national plan to vaccinate Sydney.
“Some don’t like to see this as a race, but a race it surely is,” he said. “What I did not know was that Premier [Gladys] Berejiklian is in a sprint while the rest of us are supposed to do some egg and spoon thing.”
Health Minister Greg Hunt acknowledged that NSW had received urgent help to deal with its outbreak and said the Commonwealth would redress the balance “very quickly” to make sure all states received their fair share.
Mr Andrews’ office told The Age that Victoria needed 340,000 more doses from the federal government to restore its fair share of the allocation.
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