SA Covid update: SA joins other Australian states in rejecting NSW Pfizer plea

SA has joined the rest of Australia's states in roundly rejecting a NSW plea to share Pfizer Covid vaccines to help quell the spiralling Sydney outbreak. 

• South Australia has joined a national rejection of NSW’s plea for extra Pfizer vaccines to combat its Covid-19 crisis, with Premier Steven Marshall ins­isting SA would retain its stocks.

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Mr Marshall also declared he was hopeful of students returning to school on Wednesday, continuing his optimism that the seven-day statewide lockdown would end, as scheduled, at 6pm on Tuesday.

A national cabinet meeting on Friday spurned the NSW call for more Pfizer doses to inoculate people in southwestern Sydney’s Covid-19 hotspots.Declaring SA doses would not be sent elsewhere, Mr Marshall said people were hurting in lockdown and the pathway out would not be jeopardised.

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“We are not in a position here in SA to send any of our vaccination doses to NSW – we’re in the middle of a lockdown ourselves,” Mr Marshall told The Advertiser.

National vaccine rollout chief Lieutenant General John Frewen, Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews and Queensland Acting Premier Steven Miles also publicly spurned the NSW bid.

Instead, Prime Minister Scott Morrison said after national cabinet that NSW would free up supplies to deliver more Pfizer first doses by extending from three to six weeks the duration between doses.

When asked if homeschooling SA parents could realistically expect their children to return to school on Wednesday if the lockdown ended, as scheduled, on Tuesday, Mr Marshall said: “Yes, absolutely. Getting our students back to school is a high priority for us.

“So, the very earliest we get the green light for that, we’ll get our students back. I’m hopeful that this will occur from Wednesday next week.

“We know that there’s much better educational outcomes for students at school, but also it’s a productivity issue for our state. Parents are homeschooling – that means that they’re not participating in the workforce.”

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Mr Marshall also revealed a digital booking system would be trialled from Saturday, initially at Waterworld, Ridgehaven, and extending to other Covid-19 testing centres, in a bid to slash queues.

Frustration has erupted from people forced to wait hours for tests – some even turned away – triggering intense criticism of preparedness for an outbreak and prompting an SA Pathology review.

Ahead of today’s halfway point of the week lockdown, Mr Marshall said he was “delighted with the progress”.

SA announced one new case on Friday – a man in his 60s linked to the Modbury cluster and in quarantine – after a record 23,572 tests on Thursday.

SA Health data shows almost 550,000 people have been given a Covid-19 vaccine – 41 per cent of whom are fully protected with two doses – compared with 37 per cent last week.

Speaking ahead of national cabinet, NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian branded that state’s outbreak of almost 1800 cases a national emergency and urged a refocus of the national vaccination strategy to “get at least the first jab for as many people as we can in those affected communities as possible”.

But General Frewen said: “It is really important that we continue at speed with the vaccine rollout broadly across the nation.”

National cabinet also ag­reed to work towards creating consistent health orders for truck drivers travelling between jurisdictions and the terms of reference for a second review of hotel quarantine.