Coronavirus SA: Inside our virus fighting nerve centre

Co-ordinating South Australia’s enormous response to the coronavirus pandemic is a job of staggering proportions. Here’s how they get it done.

Tucked away inside a darkened room, men and women work rapidly to co-ordinate South Australia’s crucial fight against COVID-19.

Phones ring off their hooks, rows of computer screens glow late into the night and hours seem to pass in a matter of seconds.

The command post – running out of SA Police’s CBD operations centre – is where a select group of officers run the state’s coronavirus nerve centre.

And in her 21 years with the force, Sergeant Kathryn Norris has never seen anything like it.

“I don’t think the public would know the magnitude of the co-ordination that occurs from the police operations centre,” she told The Advertiser.

“We’ve got a manifest of every person coming into the state, whether it be by air, boat or road.

Sergeant Kathryn Norris is working in the operations centre, helping co-ordinate the state's response to COVID-19. Picture: SA Police

“There’s lots of computers, screens and monitors everywhere, phones ring off the hook regularly and it’s just fielding questions and sending information out to the troops.

“It’s busy, it’s really busy. I must admit, sometimes you get that moment to breathe and you look at the time and it’s five hours later.”

Teams of up to 15 people work morning and afternoon shifts to guide frontline officers through compliance checks – which are broken up into three sections – throughout the state.

“We’ve got personal compliance, border compliance and non-essential business compliance,” Sgt Norris said.

“Three streams of work all running from the one centre, each with inspectors of chief inspectors overseeing (the work).

“We hold the intelligence databases to collate all that information and liaise directly with health (officials). Then we filter the information back to the frontline.” In SA, 3861 personal checks have been completed, with 3678 people adhering to restrictions. For businesses, of the 15,591 checks, 176 were non-compliant. It is unclear if the breaches were met with fines or cautions in either area.

“(The work we do is) absolutely critical, it’s critical,” Sgt Norris said.

“The information that we’ve got changes all the time because one person might not (test) positive one day, but come back positive in two days’ time.

“So it’s really keeping those communication lines open with health (authorities) and supporting them and updating our systems constantly.

“It’s been really quite surreal in a way. Outside of work it’s that really strange feeling, but in work it becomes reality.”

Despite confirmed cases of the virus beginning to slow in SA, three people have died as a result of COVID-19 in the past week. They are 76-year-old Malcolm Todd from Barmera, 75-year-old Francesco Ferraro from Campbelltown, and a 62-year-old Adelaide woman. She had been a passenger on the Ruby Princess cruise ship. A total of 86 SA cases of coronavirus are linked to the ship. When the crisis worsened quickly in recent weeks, Sgt Norris was pulled from a special project – a review of country policing across SA – to join the operations team to combat the pandemic.

She said the toughest challenge team members faced was keeping updated with constant changes to rules and regulations to prevent the virus spreading.

“You’ve got the Commonwealth Government that have certain directions, but then the State (Government) might have slightly different directions that are enforceable and recommendations are slightly different, so there can be confusion,” she said.

“So it’s really trying to make sure we’re on top of those changes and give that advice back to the frontline.”

More than 425km away from the operations centre – the brain of SA’s virus defence – Senior Constable First Class Geoff Yates keeps a vigilant eye on the SA-Victorian border at Mt Gambier.

The United Kingdom-born officer moved to Australia about 10 years ago and has seen family members face the brunt of the pandemic overseas.

“They’re doing it harder than we are and I think we’re doing the right thing here,” he said.

“We’re patrolling the border looking to restrict the movement of travellers into the state from Victoria to ensure they’re going to be compliant.

“(But) there are some doing the wrong thing, we appeal for them to come on-board and do what is right by themselves and the rest of the community.”

Late last month, SA’s borders were shut down to non-essential travellers to prevent further spread of the virus. Anyone who now enters the state is subject to a mandatory 14-day isolation period.