Gold Coast Schoolies: 2020 School leavers on best behaviour over first weekend
The numbers are in – Schoolies celebrations have gone quiet after the first weekend saw just a handful of school leavers treated by paramedics and no major incidents.
Gold Coast
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IT’S Schoolies – but not as the Gold Coast has ever known it.
Graduating school leavers have been on their best behaviour on the Glitter Strip during the first weekend of 2020’s unofficial celebrations, after COVID-19 saw the official event scrapped by the Queensland government.
Revellers appear to have instead flocked to the Sunshine Coast, where a popular Noosa beach was shut down on Sunday morning while workers cleaned up Schoolies mess.
Less than two dozen people – only a fraction of them schoolies – were treated at the Surfers Paradise emergency treatment centre on Saturday night.
Senior operations supervisor Grace Elliot said the centre’s first night had been “really successful”.
“On the Gold Coast we saw 17 patients and only three of them required transport. These aren’t necessarily school leavers.
“We had a range of patients from the age of 16 up to 40 with varying degrees of injury.
“(Schoolies) is certainly different to previous years but we are prepared and ready for school leavers and anyone else holidaying on the Gold Coast. We’ll just to wait and see what happens.”
Rockhampton 18-year-old Amy Barnes, who is on the Gold Coast until Wednesday for unofficial schoolies celebrations, said despite the event being scrapped the trip was still “pretty good”.
“It’s really relaxing actually because there’s not much going on at the moment,” she said. “It would have been pretty exciting (to have the official Schoolies event but) we can’t really do anything about it.
“We went shopping today, and we’ve been at the beach, and we’re going to Movie World (on Monday) so we’re still doing exciting stuff.”
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