Queensland cafe owner fires up over Covid-19 ‘sh*t show’ in state’s southeast

A business owner has slammed Queensland’s response to the Omicron Covid-19 variant after her cafe was forced to close for a week.

A Queensland cafe owner is furious at the state government’s response to the rapidly evolving Omicron situation in the state after she was forced to shut her doors for a week.

Maria Elita, who runs the popular Frigg Cafe and Catering on the Gold Coast, is calling for clearer instructions from health authorities and a change to the definition of close contacts after her business was stung badly.

Last Thursday afternoon, on December 23, Ms Elita was horrified to discover that one of her staff members had tested positive to Covid-19.

The employee had worked at the cafe in the morning to around lunch time, wearing a mask all the while, then returned home where they started suffering from Covid-19 symptoms. When they got a test, they were, sure enough, Covid-positive.

Ms Elita and her staff were deemed close contacts so she had to immediately shut down her Manly West cafe and sent her staff into isolation.

However, she was alarmed at the fact her venue was never listed as an exposure site and also at how some of her staff had to wait as long as five days to receive their Covid test results.

“Right now, I don’t think the government even knows what they’re doing because it’s a sh*t show,” she said on social media.

The cafe had to close during its busiest period.

Maria Elita is fuming.

“The southeast Queensland Covid tracing, does not exist anymore people, it’s not being updated,” Ms Elita continued.

“It’s an absolute Queensland sh*t show … I don’t even know how to deal with it anymore.

“We’ve always done the right thing but why bother with things like checking in anymore if they don’t update contact tracing, they’ve basically just given up on that.”

She said that customers would have had no idea that they had potentially been to a Covid exposure site except for the fact she was sharing the news widely on the cafe’s social media channels.

The business owner is now calling for greater guidance from the government.

Speaking to Sunrise on Thursday morning, she said: “We need urgency. We need
changes, big time.

“The dumb mastery of this whole event is that there are so many people in hospitality that have closed their businesses, we have closed their businesses, we have close contacts, and we need something, some rules, some guidelines, to keep businesses open.

“I think I’m speaking on behalf of a lot of business owners, a lot of hospitality, we need something so quick.

“Because we have gone from hero to zero in like 60 seconds in Queensland. And we need to catch up.”

The cafe has reopened to do takeaway only.

Ms Elita told the program she wanted the isolating rules around being a close contact to change so that businesses like hers could get up and running as soon as possible.

“What I am looking forward to what comes out of the conference with the PM and ministers, because I think something needs to change,” she said.

“Because we had a staff member here who had a mask, who was in close contact with some staff, but not all staff and then we have had to close everything down, waiting on tests …

“We waited five days for the first lot of tests for some of our staff. So there just has to be a bit more definition.”

She was also unimpressed by double standards in health advice — with a hospitality setting like hers categorised as high risk while events with thousands of people not even requiring a Covid-19 test if someone had the virus.

“In hospitality, we have been told we are high risk,” she continued.

“Even though we might have 20 or 30 people in a cafe, you know, compared to a stadium of 20,000 people at a sporting event, which doesn’t have to do all the mandatory stuff we have to do.

“I am very much pro people, pro-business and pro-solutions. So it [the solution] has just come so quick, especially in Queensland where it has just come out of the blue for us. So we just want something to help us get through. Let’s give it the next week, let alone the next month.”

Originally published as Queensland cafe owner fires up over Covid-19 ‘sh*t show’ in state’s southeast