PNG Covid: Daru outbreak threatens Delta spread to Torres Strait Islands, Australia

A Delta strain explosion is causing chaos on Australia’s doorstep with reports of a hospital crisis and growing threats to Torres Strait Island communities.

A DELTA strain explosion is causing chaos on Australia’s doorstep with reports of a hospital crisis and growing threats to Torres Strait Island communities.

Papua New Guinea is scrambling to cope with Covid-19 numbers amid reports the Daru Provincial Hospital is buckling under the pressure of a Delta outbreak.

Daru is only about 50km from Saibai Island – but the threat is much closer.

Leichhardt MP Warren Entsch said treaty villages 4km from Australian territory had been cut off from the delivery of goods from the Torres Strait.

The Australian Medical Assistance Team unloads the vaccines with the assistance of Australian Defence Force staff based in Papua New Guinea.

It leaves villagers with no option but to visit Covid-ravaged Daru for essential goods.

“I’ve got no confidence in the PNG-based DFAT (Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade) people,” he said.

Mr Entsch said he had tried for months in vain to get the Torres Strait’s Taipan and IBIS stores approved to resume contactless deliveries.

“People in the treaty villages are pretty much totally dependent on the border stores on Saibai and Boigu for their basics,” he said.

The Daru Hospital tuberculosis ward before a major redevelopment in 2012.

“DFAT have done everything they could to justify not giving them another shipment. As a direct consequence, they’ve forced these poor buggers back into Daru.”

Concerted efforts between Australian and PNG health authorities to administer the AstraZeneca vaccine have been notching up good numbers in the villages.

I was photographing some of the wheelchairs here at the Daru Provincial Hospital. pic.twitter.com/oNqdnkLf8X

— joshua meraveka (@joshmeraveka) August 23, 2021

However, Mr Entsch said it was only a matter of time before desperation led infected villagers over the border.

“As Daru explodes with Covid, as we know it will, these poor buggers will have nowhere to go,” he said.

Leichhardt MP Warren Entsch visits the Daru Hospital tuberculosis ward in 2012.

“They don’t grow rice, they can’t make flour, they can’t make cooking oil and to hunt they use outboard motors.

“Some of these villages are only 4km from Australia.

“You can only imagine the risk that poses.”

Mr Entsch did not believe a border patrols would keep hungry villagers from straying onto neighbouring islands.

Covid testing at a swabbing facility in Papua New Guinea.

“We’ve got people jumping across the border in Tweed Heads not because they’re starving, they just want company,” he said.

“In PNG, it’s about food.”

PNG has officially had 18,542 Covid cases and 204 deaths, although true numbers are likely higher.

The country’s biggest hospital, in Port Moresby, recently ordered doctors to swab all corpses attributable to death by unknown causes or respiratory disease to test for Covid-19 due to concerns about dangerously low testing and vaccination rates.

More humanitarian cargo is unloaded from a C-17A with the assistance of PNG based Australian Defence co-operation personnel.

The hospital in Daru shut down in 2018 after it ran out of food for patients and other essential items. That closure was particularly controversial since the PNG Government was spending millions of kina at the time to prepare to host an upcoming APEC Summit in Port Moresby.

DFAT and the PNG Department of Health have been asked for comment.

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Originally published as PNG Covid: Daru outbreak threatens Delta spread to Torres Strait Islands, Australia