COVID NSW: 16 days without a local case, WA’s swipe at NSW test numbers
NSW has recorded its 16th day without a local COVID case while a federal minister says WA has “questions to respond to”. It comes as that state’s Premier took a swipe at NSW testing rates.
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WA has recorded no new local cases of COVID-19, the state’s Premier Mark McGowan has announced.
Mr McGowan said 16,490 tests were conducted across the state yesterday on the first full day of the Perth lockdown.
Announcing the testing numbers, the WA Premier also took a veiled swipe at testing rates in NSW.
Mr McGowan said the tests performed in WA yesterday “is more than double the number of tests completed the day after the Northern Beaches outbreak in Sydney”.
NSW reported 7,531 tests on December 18, the day after the Northern Beaches cluster first emerged. However that number reflects tests processed in the 24 hours to 8pm the day before, representing swabs taken on December 16 – the day before the new cases were discovered.
Meanwhile the WA government has backed down on a bizarre rule preventing parents from leaving their home for exercise with more than one child.
“On public health grounds, the rules have been amended to allow a maximum two adults from the same household and their children to exercise in the neighbourhood up to a maximum of five people for one hour each day,” Mr McGowan said.
Rules for travellers still in the hotel at the centre of the state’s lockdown have also been strengthened. Travellers due to leave the hotel in the coming days will remain in quarantine until they return a negative test. Travellers that have recently left will need to isolate until returning a negative test result.
Mr McGowan said no further international arrivals will go into the Four Points by Sheraton “at present”.
WA’s chief health officer failed to tell state and federal counterparts of a new local case in Perth because Premier Mark McGowan hadn’t been told of the case before the meeting of health experts began, the state’s Deputy Premier has suggested.
The Australian Health Protection Principal Committee (AHPPC) met at 7.30am Perth time (10.30 AEDT) on Sunday, Deputy Premier Roger Cook said.
“The Chief Medical Officer hadn’t had the opportunity to brief the Premier (on the new case) at that point,” Mr Cook said.
Mr Cook said the national chief health officer was advised at 2.30pm AEDT and a briefing was provided to AHPPC at 7pm AEDT.
Asked if WA officials knew about the positive test when the AHPPC met on Sunday morning, Mr Cook said:
“Obviously we had a positive test, we knew about it, but we didn’t know the details. Consistent with the protocols between the Chief Medical Officers and Chief Health Officers,
that information was provided to the national Chief Medical Officer in the appropriate time.”
WA TOLD: PLEASE EXPLAIN
The West Australian government must explain why it failed to alert other states about a case of COVID-19 in the community at a meeting of chief health officers hours after the positive test.
Chief health officers will be expected to “get to the bottom” of how and why WA did not report the COVID-19 case at a meeting of the Australian Health Principal Protection Committee (AHPPC) on Sunday morning.
“We obviously expected that all states and territories will share information in the timely manner, information in the timely manner, in a transparent manner and that’s very important to everybody being able to make informed decisions as to how they respond to COVID,” he said.
“It’s an expectation I’m sure that chief medical officers will discuss amongst themselves during their daily meetings as they do.”
Mr Birmingham said it was important all states and territories understood the responsibilities they had “to one another” so that “everybody knows” how to keep Australians safe.
“We’re talking about one case and one circumstance and how we handle that and whereas elsewhere around the world, they’re dealing with so many thousands of cases and tragically of deaths,” he said.
“So our systems have held up pretty well here but in each and every one of these cases, there are lessons to be learned and no doubt out of this one too.”
16 DAYS WITHOUT A NSW CASE
NSW recorded no new local cases of COVID in the 24 hours to 8pm last night, marking the 16th virus-free day in a row.
However only 6,686 tests were processed in the reporting period, up from 6,023 the day before.
Meanwhile, a new Public Health Order is now in place mandating anyone in NSW from the locked-down areas of Western Australia must comply with that state’s stay-at-home orders or face a fine.
Anyone entering NSW must complete a declaration form stating whether they have been in the regions impacted or attended venues of concern identified by WA Health.
Two new COVID cases have been detected in returned travellers.
LABOR: CRAIG KELLY NEEDS CALLING OUT
Anti-vaxxer conspiracy theories pedalled by Liberal backbencher Craig Kelly must be reigned in to protect important public health messages, Labor has warned.
The opposition’s new health spokesman Mark Butler has conceded he is “concerned” about further boosting public awareness of Mr Kelly’s views by calling them out, but argued “silence” was not an option.
“Of course I’m concerned about the amplification,” he said.
“I don’t do this lightly … but this fellow has a social media through Facebook reach that’s vastly greater than the Department of Health’s Facebook reach.”
Mr Butler has taken aim at Prime Minister Scott Morrison for failing to rebuke Mr Kelly directly.
“The top office in the land needs to call him out,” he said.
“I don’t think the right response is silence in the face of an elected member of parliament who sits in the Government’s party room accusing the Chief Medical Officer of crimes against humanity, accusing mask-wearing advocates of child abuse.”
Mr Morrison on Monday told Australians they should not get their coronavirus vaccine news from Facebook, and added that Mr Kelly was “not my doctor.”
But Mr Butler said the “glib” comments from the PM were insufficient.
“Every step of the way, as we’ve been trying to build this response, trying to put Australians in the best position to get through this pandemic, we’ve had someone receiving taxpayer funds as an MP, sitting in the Government’s party room, undermining that response,” Mr Butler said.
WA PREMIER LASHES OUT AT MINISTER
The WA government has been left scrambling to boost its COVID response capacity a day after announcing the state’s first local case in 10 months on Sunday — and no new cases on Monday.
It came as a defiant WA Premier Mark McGowan declared there is “no other solution” to stopping the spread of COVID-19 than the hard lockdown he imposed Sunday afternoon in the wake of a hotel quarantine security worker’s positive test.
The McGowan government moved to increase the number of COVID testing clinics across the state from just seven to 25.
Mr McGowan also urgently brought forward a planned expansion of the state’s QR check-in system for venues, which was previously scheduled to come into effect from February 16.
The state government will also seek to address whether security guards working in quarantine hotels can hold second jobs.
Despite this, NSW Deputy Premier John Barilaro on Monday questioned whether the WA government has the capacity to manage a community outbreak of COVID-19 after being virus free since the start of the pandemic.
“Do they have the skill sets to manage (an outbreak)? I don’t know. Hopefully they’ve resourced up their health people to do so, but time will tell,” Mr Barilaro told The Daily Telegraph.
In his most strident criticism to date of the WA Premier, Mr Barilaro said the new local case in WA proved the state’s hard border with the rest of Australia is “pointless”.
Responding to the criticism, Mr McGowan said the NSW Deputy Premier is “obviously wrong”.
“Clearly borders help … unfortunately NSW I don’t think has learned that lesson,” Mr McGowan said.
The WA Premier also lashed out at Home Affairs Minister Peter Dutton, who had called the snap lockdown an unrealistic “political slogan”.
Mr McGowan said quarantine is a federal government responsibility, which Mr Dutton is avoiding.
“He shouldn’t be criticising when we’re doing the task he should be performing under the Constitution,” Mr McGowan said.
The barbs came as Mr McGowan defended the delay in his government implementing daily saliva swabs for hotel quarantine workers.
He said a decision was made to do daily tests on the “eighth or ninth of January,” but the policy only came into effect on Friday.
“That was relatively quick to get that system in place,” Mr McGowan said.
NSW began daily tests for all staff working in hotels used to house COVID-positive travellers on January 21, after announcing the policy on January 7.
Security guards working in NSW quarantine hotels have been subject to daily tests since December 14.
WA chief health officer Andy Robertson also revealed the state can process “probably up to” 20,000 tests each day, using private pathology labs. At the height of the NSW testing blitz sparked by the Avalon outbreak, NSW repeatedly processed more than 40,000 swabs within a 24-hour period including a record 69,809 processed in the 24 hours to 8pm on Christmas Eve.
There were 3171 tests taken in WA on Sunday, including in the afternoon after the new local case was announced. Over the past week, testing rates have ranged from a high of 954, to a daily low of 514.
NSW processed 6023 tests in the 24 hours to 8pm on Sunday night, the lowest daily numbers since before the Avalon outbreak. The Berejiklian government wants around 25,000 people to present for testing each day.
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