Australia’s peak medical group says the NSW government has put the rest of the country at risk by its decision not to go “hard and early” in its response to the outbreak on Sydney's northern beaches, which is suspected to have seeded cases in Victoria.
Victorians have been warned to expect more coronavirus cases in the days to come, as the state’s health authorities attempt to establish how far the virus had spread and thousands of Victorian holidaymakers rushed back from NSW and into home isolation before a hard border closure.
Premier Gladys Berejiklian.Credit:Jessica Hromas
The Victorian outbreak grew to 10 on Friday. Two more cases were linked to a suspected transmission event at the Smile Buffalo Thai restaurant in Melbourne’s Black Rock.
Australian Medical Association vice-president Chris Moy said the NSW government was “playing the odds” by relying heavily on the state’s much-vaunted contact tracing system instead of imposing a quick lockdown to stop the seeding across Sydney and now, it is suspected, to Victoria.
“They have put themselves and put the rest of the country at risk,” Dr Moy said.
“I can completely understand why Victoria has reacted [by] closing the border very quickly, because they are very worried about this.”
Nathan Goring looks on as a long queue of vehicles forms at the Victorian border near Albury.Credit:Jason Robins
NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian has resisted pressure to force Sydney into lockdown, mandate masks and ban crowds at the SCG despite the number of COVID-19 cases in her state growing from zero to 170 in two weeks.
Ms Berejiklian said on Thursday that NSW was trying to “strike the right balance” and would instead rely on the community to take up the strong recommendation to wear a face mask in all public indoor settings.
Victorian Health Minister Martin Foley said the state's approach was to go “hard and early” by mandating masks indoors, closing the border to NSW and reducing the number of people allowed in private homes, from 30 to 15.
“And we don’t rule out having to take further measures, if that's what the public [health] advice is,” he said on Friday.
“We have to go hard and we have to go early to get us back to those days of no infections.”
Despite calls for Victorians to undergo testing, the Health Department was reporting waits at testing sites of as much as four hours on Friday afternoon.
“There are some sites where the number of people in the queue has already reached the capacity of the site, and therefore, people will be referred to another testing site,” a Health Department statement said.
Testing hours would be extended on Friday night and locations opened over the weekend to accommodate demand, the department said.
On Friday morning, the state’s COVID-19 response commander Jeroen Weimar said three people were being investigated as possible patients zero in the Victorian outbreak, which dates back to December 21 when it is thought an infectious person dined at the Black Rock restaurant.
Mr Weimar said one of the suspected people had already returned a negative result for coronavirus, so serology testing was under way to see if the person might have previously had the infection. He said the other two people being investigated had been in Sydney for a day within recent weeks.
Mr Weimar said there was a “great cause for concern” that there may be cases across the state that authorities were unaware of and he urged people to get tested if they reported symptoms regardless of where they lived
“We have returning travellers from NSW across our entire state," he said.
Signs at a Heidelberg testing site telling people to return later.Credit:Simon Castles
“This is not just a Bayside suburbs or Mitcham issue ... this is a Victorian issue.”
The two new cases announced on Friday ate at the restaurant on December 21 and were on a road trip to NSW when they became aware of details of the outbreak. They have since returned to Victoria, but won’t be counted in the state’s official coronavirus tally.
Another of the positive cases is in Leongatha, in Gippsland, and COVID-19 viral fragments have been picked up in a wastewater sample from Lakes Entrance, about 300 kilometres east of Melbourne.
About 170 primary and secondary contacts of the outbreak have been identified.
University of Melbourne epidemiologist Professor Tony Blakely said the NSW government should have locked down the northern beaches outbreak 48 to 72 hours earlier than they did.
“They were slow,” he said.
He said he was also among many experts in Australia “scratching their heads” over why the state was unwilling to mandate masks, saying it was a low-cost move that might have prevented some of the NSW cases.
However, he said the key lesson from the NSW outbreak was not how it had spread to Victoria, but how it was suspected to have spread from an international arrival to NSW. He said hotel quarantine, border and airline staff should be considered as the first candidates to receive vaccines in Australia.
“My rough is guess is that we are going to see a leakage out of international quarantine roughly once a month, somewhere in Australia, and this will happen again and again,” he said.
Professor Blakely said he expected that the Victorian government would begin encouraging people to work from home once more and keep as close as they could to their homes or holiday homes.
“We don’t need to use hard lockdowns, that’s the plan anyway,” he said. “But you still want to give your contact tracers a good change of pulling it off by doing things that don’t have an economic or major social disruption.”
AMA president Dr Omar Khorshid said he believed Victoria should have closed its borders to NSW sooner, saying the significant period of time between the transmission event at the Thai restaurant on December 21 and when cases were first detected on Wednesday afternoon, nine days later, was a concern.
“Maybe this can be jumped on, but there is so much prospect of it being back out there, it’s really scary,” Dr Khorshid said.
The AMA has called for the NSW government to make masks mandatory indoors and have criticised a decision to allow about 20,000 people to attend the Sydney cricket Test.
Dr Khorshid said he believed NSW health authorities would now be regretting not implementing a quick lockdown in response to the northern beaches outbreak.
“It just stops transmission in its tracks ... Where Sydney is going to be living with rolling outbreaks, restrictions and contact tracing for months.”
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Aisha Dow reports on health for The Age and is a former city reporter.
Paul is a Victorian political reporter for The Age.
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2021-01-01 12:47:00Z
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