Only vaccinated frontline health staff to work with COVID patients

Only vaccinated healthcare workers will be allowed to work with patients who test positive to COVID from tomorrow.

Only health workers who have received their first COVID-19 vaccination will be allowed to work directly with patients who have tested positive from tomorrow.

The new Queensland mandate comes after a Princess Alexandra (PA) Hospital nurse became the second frontline health worker this month to catch the highly-contagious UK strain.

Asked why the new requirement had not been in place since the start of the vaccine rollout, Dr Young said there were not enough vaccinations available.

“We had to roll the vaccine out,” she said.

“It’s just so unfortunate that this outbreak has occurred when it did.”

Only health workers who have received their first COVID-19 vaccination will be allowed to work directly with patients who have tested positive from tomorrow in Queensland. Picture: Supplied

From Wednesday, only people who have had their first dose of the vaccine – whether it is one made by the Pfizer or AstraZeneca companies – can work directly with confirmed COVID-19 cases.

“That was always our plan,” Dr Young said. “We did set ourselves that target for between four and six weeks to get all of 1A workers vaccinated.

“We’ve reached that, we believe we’ll finish that by tomorrow.

“And then the plan was always, once we had people vaccinated, because we needed to have people available to look after all of these cases, and as you heard earlier we’ve gone very, very rapidly from five cases in just over a month to 78 so we needed staff to look after these cases.”

About 41,000 frontline health workers in Queensland have been vaccinated, with the majority yet to receive their second jab.

Dr Young said one of the cases – a nurse at the PA Hospital – worked in the COVID ward on March 18 but she does not believe that’s when the nurse caught it.

“It’s not that shift that has led to the infection, it’s when she worked there on the 23rd,” she said.

“She wasn’t managing COVID cases (on March 23).”

Queensland Chief Health Officer Dr Jeanette Young speaks at a press conference to provide a Covid update. Picture: Dan Peled/NCA NewsWire

Dr Young said she doesn’t know how the nurse contracted the virus, saying she only found out late last night.

The Chief Health Officer said the number of cases had ramped up at the same time authorities were trying to vaccinate people.

“We started with a smaller number in 1A and that number has increased because we’ve seen this big increase in case numbers,” she said.

“So the PA has been doing an absolutely first class job, as has all of our hospitals.”

Meanwhile, Queensland Health has confirmed that a high-security isolation floor at the Royal Brisbane and Women’s Hospital has all COVID-19 positive patients, including those from PNG.

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Originally published as Only vaccinated frontline health staff to work with COVID patients