From afar, the COVID-19 caper looks covered in Queensland — even if it’s beautiful one day, closed the next.
Our daily case numbers are currently sitting below 20 despite several exposure sites, our schools are open, along with our restaurants, beaches and sporting competitions. This is a stunning achievement, for now.
But a false sense of security hangs over the systems, processes and policies underpinning that COVID effort. That was proved repeatedly in the past week. And if — or when — COVID comes knocking at the Queensland border, we could quickly face the same challenges being experienced in NSW and Victoria, potentially without the same safeguards.
Queensland’s defence revolves around three variables: quarantine, registration and vaccination. So let’s just look at quarantine. Even without any COVID breakout, we’ve already been forced to shut that down — separating families and loved ones — because there was no room at the inn. What will happen if we endure even a modest outbreak?
Then there’s registration, which the premier and chief health officer continue to maintain is front and centre of their COVID effort. But after a NSW truckie tested positive and was found to be in the community for two days while infectious, a business in Beenleigh, just south of Brisbane, became a major exposure site. A week on, contract tracers have been unable to find out details of all those who might have been exposed because the check-in code was not being used by many on entry.
QR check-ins have been a rallying point for the state: while everyone is using the QR code, lockdown is less likely because contract tracers can be on the case. Now that the nation’s privacy watchdog has found Queensland Police accessed Check In Qld app data as part of an investigation, that push has been mightily muted.
A recent lockdown in Brisbane involving the wealthy Brisbane Grammar School showed this pattern over and over again. In at least four cases known to this columnist, Queensland Health contacted exposure-site visitors up to eight days after they had already started to self-isolate of their own volition after seeing the news or being contacted by the school.
Eight days! What would happen if this COVID outbreak had been the one to spread across the community? Or the number of people who had to be traced was more than 1000?
In a moment of honesty, a government source says the state might have been lucky that that outbreak involved a school of professional parents who knew to do the “right thing’’ and could afford to stay home.
But where did Queensland Health then send many of those isolating parents for the required test? To a public COVID testing station, where they mixed again with the community.
And so we come to the last leg of the Queensland COVID plan: vaccination. Here the government has a job in front of it. In some pockets, vaccination levels are higher than expected. In others, particularly outside the state’s south-east, the vaccine isn’t seen as important because COVID has not yet been a visitor.
But even the state’s vaccine registration platform is failing many in need. Anyone can register, and every day a healthy young person is being given a booking ahead of an aged care worker or vulnerable community member.
That’s not the young person’s fault. They simply registered as they have been asked to. The system is not sufficiently prioritising those who need to be vaccinated early. And others are booking multiple appointments in a bid to get the best one, and then failing to cancel those other pre-booked appointments.
Surely a working system needs to pick that up. It’s obvious that people will try to game the system to do what everyone from the prime minister down is asking them to do: get vaccinated.
There’s no consistency in the vaccine experience. At one centre in inner Brisbane, nurses are vaccinating one person every three or four minutes. Ten kilometres away in a big vaccination hub, nurses are jabbing one patient every 15 minutes or so.
Shaky quarantine, shaky contact tracing, shaky vaccination rollout. It’s no wonder that time, energy, money and resources are going into closing the borders — even at a punishing cost to divided families.
So while it looks shiny and bright, Queensland’s COVID effort is tarnished beneath the bonnet. Let’s just hope it doesn’t need to be lifted any time soon.
Zero cases again today in Qld.
Everywhere I go in Brisbane I see people masked and using the QR codes.
I don’t get this whole ‘how terrible is Qlds response’ narrative.
Of course there’s no room for complacency.
It’s about preparing now for the inevitable incursion of covid. And that’s what this time can buy us.
Vaccination, HCF readiness, PPE supplies, HCW preparations etc.
Same in SA where thankfully we have less of the conspiracy anti vaxxer right wing supporting nutters. QR codes, masks, distancing, all observed by the majority
‘Shiny and bright Bloody Labor government’ …. “tarnished beneath the bonnet”?
Another under the mudguard sod from this ex-Murdoch mechanical hack.
How about a piece on the lop-sided vax supply to NSW/Vic : against the rest, by King’s pet Limited News Party feds?
Or on the manifestations of NSW Liberal Shredderjiklian’s Clayton’s – before the horse was let loose to bolt – lock-down?
Or the political fixer appointment of IPA Muppet Lorraine Finlay to Human Rights Commissioner?
Premier Palaszczuk & CHO Young, regardless of an enviable record in managing Covid, cannot please the author who managed to catch fleas from News Corp & has never shaken them since.
A very unfair attack on the author’s background. I don’t agree with parts of this article, but I appreciate the spirit in which it’s written, and that’s quite fair. I also agree that while the overall approach of the Queensland Government in managing Covid has been good, there are areas where they’re shaky. These nuances are welcome.
There are issues with the Queensland approach – as there are in every other state (and territory). The quarantine criticism is over the top though. This issue applies in all jurisdictions. Queensland is the only one to go ahead and fund the building of their own quarantine facility (the one at Toowoomba). I suspect that is because of timing. The Toowoomba crew claim they will be ready this November. I strongly suspect the federal government quarantine facility being built on the old barracks site near the airport will not be ready until sometime next year. Given the federal government’s normal performance in contracting out and delivering anything it could end up being November next year.
Toowoomba is isolated from built up areas but on top of an airport which can handle fully loaded 747s. The Wagners offered this to Morrison 18 (?) months ago and suggested that it would be operational within 6 weeks The federal “quarantine station” is in Pinkenbar in a busy commercial industrial area and given the poor planning of the Morrison Mob, it could take a year to operate.
And the ‘announcement’ of one for WA will take 6 months too according to Scumbo
Be reasonable Peter. The LNP has to contract at least one consulting company with exorbitant fees to prepare a report which will be secret cabinet-in-confidence and then troll through its list of major donors and mates before it can plan & build its quarantine facility at an exorbitant cost to reward its chosen donor/mate. It will contract Harvey Norman to do the fit-out.
Toowoomba will never be used. It will be unnecessary
How do you know? Are you a know all or a coalition whisperer?
statistics
Queensland’s COVID effort is likely “tarnished beneath the bonnet” to a much more serious degree by the siphoning off of thousands of vaccines which should have been available here to NSW. The PM for NSW and the Premier there want to ensure the race to vaccinate (which at the vital early stage wasn’t a race) is won in a Liberal run state. Another biased diatribe from Madonna King hoping for a News Corp recall.
Same with SA supplies, suddenly they’re non existent in GPs rooms, yet NSW truckies keep coming over the border here not abiding by the testing requirements, fans of the NSW Coalition no doubt.