Queensland Health must wait to see whether easing Covid restrictions also eases the strain on the system

Queenslanders are waiting nervously to discover whether dropping Covid quarantine rules will improve hospital workforce pressures, or push up the numbers of admissions, with the Health Minister saying only one thing will determine what happens.

Time will tell whether dropping quarantine rules for Covid close contacts will improve hospital workforce pressures, or push up the numbers of admissions, the Health Minister says.

Yvette D’Ath made the admission as she defended Opposition claims patients were “dicing with death” and ramping was worse in Queensland than anywhere else in the country.

While official figures show as many as 56 per cent of patients were being ramped outside emergency departments in some hospitals in December, Ms D’Ath said 67 per cent of patients on Tuesday were admitted from ambulances within half an hour.

As Queensland officially recorded 5142 new Covid cases on Tuesday and one death, there were 240 people in hospital beds being treated for the virus and 2400 health staff unable to work.

“This is going to be an ongoing challenge, not just for Queensland,” Ms D’Ath said, pointing to newly-delivered beds already being taken up by Covid patients.

“You can pick up any paper or google ambulance ramping and you will see every single state is facing problems right now and the challenges of the demand pressure.”

The minister said she would “love to have a magic wand and stop this overnight” but “no one has a quick fix”.

Health Minister Yvette DAth. Picture: Annette Dew

She said allowing close contacts to work from Friday, with some restrictions, “will ease some pressures, but we do have to be aware that more close contacts in the community probably means more positive cases going forward”.

“How many people that means in hospital, time will tell.”

Asked whether the government should have planned better in previous years, she said: “I don’t think we could have ever predicted Covid and we certainly couldn’t have predicted the significant migration from interstate (and) the fastest growing population growth across the country.”

Opposition Leader David Crisafulli said the government could not fix problems until they acknowledged them.

He said not only were the ramping figures concerning, but how they were rising.

“So we’ve got 17 hospitals, that’s the vast majority of the large hospitals, that have actually increased (ramping times),” he said. “That is at a time when the government says it’s addressing the problems.

“Surely that’s ringing alarm bells.

“Surely that is a call to action that the government can no longer refuse to listen to.”