One new case of COVID-19 in Queensland

Health Minister Steven Miles has urged Queenslanders to stay home from planned protests this weekend after a two-year-old boy became the state’s latest active coronavirus case.

HEALTH Minister Steven Miles has confirmed a two-year-old boy is the latest coronavirus case in Queensland.

Mr Miles said the boy, from Brisbane, was known to have been travelling with his family overseas recently – which means the case is not locally acquired.

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It is understood the boy had initially quarantined in Victoria before returning to Queensland.

“That brings to four our number of active cases,” he said.

“Two of those are in hospital, one in intensive care.

“It would be one of our youngest cases.”

There are a total of 1,064 total confirmed cases and 1,051 patients have recovered.

Six Queenslanders with COVID-19 have died.

Mr Miles urged people to maintain social distancing ahead of planned protest this weekend.

He said if people wanted to protest, there were other ways to do it.

Mr Miles would not say if he believed people should be fined.

“Every Queenslander should comply these directions,” Mr Miles said.

“It’s these directions that have kept people safe and so I would urge every Queenslander to continue to comply with them

“And if people want to protest, there are lots of ways that we can get those messages out.

“Any breach of these restrictions does create a risk and so we want to avoid that risk because we want to keep seeing what we have seen so far.”

Mr Miles said with the recent protests, different states took different approaches but “ultimately got the same outcome”.

“Victoria said they’d fine protesters,” he said.

“The protest went ahead.

“NSW tried to outlaw the protest, but that was overturned in court.

“Here in Queensland, we urged people not to participate, but the outcome was broadly the same.”

Mr Miles said he was not aware of plans for a further protest, but insisted it was very important that people abided by the restrictions.

When asked if he was worried that fines and penalties were not a deterrent for people, Mr Miles said it was a matter for police to consider what “tools they have will assist them”.

“Clearly one of the things they need to consider is whether those threats would be effective and what we saw in other states was that they weren’t,” he said.