Samantha Maiden: Dystopian border roulette won’t fly now Covid’s here to stay
Book a trip this Christmas and you might not find out until you land whether you’re spending two weeks on a beach or locked in quarantine, writes Samantha Maiden.
Opinion
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Did you hear the one about the brutal new Queensland reality TV show?
Book a Christmas holiday today and you get to find out at the end of the flight if it’s a fortnight in Noosa eating mangoes or two weeks locked up in mandatory quarantine.
It would be funny if it wasn’t so dystopian.
But this was the fate that awaited two plane loads of passengers after a person with Covid-19 flew into Brisbane and Townsville on Monday.
It was the first domestic flight from Newcastle since the Queensland border reopened and the first carrying a suspected Omicron case. One superspreader event at a Newcastle nightclub has already led to more than 150 infections in a crowd of 650.
So, perhaps it was understandable that health authorities adopted a cautious response.
The decision to immediately declare the entire plane close contacts, however, sent a terrible message to families flying into Queensland for the school holidays.
Why would you want to book a trip with that uncertainty? Everyone on the flight apart from children were likely vaccinated.
It’s another reminder that state governments need to get their acts together with clear rules so travellers know what to expect.
On Wednesday, the Queensland government overturned the original decision in a victory for common sense and told the travellers they were now free to go as long as they were not sitting in the rows closest to the infected passenger.
“Just as we did with Delta, when there is the new variant of Omicron on-board, our Public Health Unit acted cautiously while they and the chief health officer analysed overnight what should be the approach,” Queensland Health Minister Yvette D’Ath said.
“They might have passed each other on the way to the bathroom.”
But the damage was done and it’s likely to leave many families preferring to face a long drive rather than risk a flight.
Surely it would have been better to say to travellers “our hope is that only those sitting in proximity will be put into quarantine but given the infectiousness of Omicron we will give health officials 24 hours to work out what happens next.”
Instead, the message went out that any plane that arrived risked being chucked into quarantine.
Going forward, if the new approach is that you only have to quarantine if you’re sitting near the infected passengers, that is better than the knee-jerk reaction of putting the entire plane into lockdown.
But with cases exponentially rising in NSW, and remaining high in Victoria, the risk of a stranger having Covid on your flight is real.
That level of risk is terrible news for the tourism industry and thousands of jobs across Australia.
Earlier, Prime Minister Scott Morrison criticised the Queensland government for the decision and suggested political leaders find solutions.
“It’s not Christmas for almost two weeks. PCR testing and looking at ways to ensure people will be able to join their families I would hope is a very high priority for them,” he said.
“There’s nothing magical about 14 days but with PCR testing and other things that can be done, I’m sure those who have been caught up in that would be happy to have those tests every single day … we’ve got to be more innovative and we’ve got to be finding ways to let people rejoin the community.”
But the balancing act that state governments are conducting was underlined just a few hours later when the NSW government breezily announced the state is on track to reach case numbers of up to 25,000 a day by early next year.
“It is concerning that the simple maths has been looked at by the epidemiology Public Health unit and the University of NSW. What they are telling us is that by the end of January we could be looking at 25,000 cases of the virus every single day,” Health Minister Brad Hazzard said on Wednesday.
“That takes us to about 175,000 cases in a week. That is a big difference to the 1360 today, which is already a cause for concern.”
NSW Premier Dominic Perrottet wants voters to focus on the ICU numbers, not the infection rate.
“Yes, case numbers will increase, and they will increase tomorrow and the next day and the day after that,’’ he said.
“We need to learn to live alongside the virus and I want to instil confidence in our people that we can do that.”
That might be true, but it’s worrying news for parents of children who are still too young to be vaccinated, regardless of how many times we are reassured that impact on kids isn’t anything to get anxious about.
Roll on those vaccinations for kids aged 5-12 in January. It sounds like it can’t come soon enough as numbers peak in NSW.
And while the plight of politicians crisscrossing the country to fight the next election is of lesser concern, it’s hard not to imagine that campaigning will need to be innovative this time around to prevent the campaign superspreader events.
Expect more online events and less kissing of babies in supermarkets.
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