‘People are going to die’: Horror warning to border hoppers
The ‘incomprehensible’ actions of COVID-liars and border hoppers is placing our entire state at risk, public health experts say.
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‘One person can cause a pandemic’: That’s the terrifying yet timely warning from virology experts to anyone dodging quarantine restrictions.
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Since its borders reopened, Queensland has seen a spate of bad behaviour, including travellers who’ve hidden in car boots and given fake names to dodge mandatory quarantine.
Queensland University of Technology professor of public health, and former Queensland chief health officer, Dr Gerry Fitzgerald, has labelled these acts as “incomprehensible”.
“The price to be paid is a large number of people are going to die … and it’s not only the deaths, it’s the people who get sick,” Dr Fitzgerald said.
University of Queensland virology expert Associate Professor Ian Mackay warned that in pandemics the stakes are always high and the wrong action can snowball to devastating extremes.
“When there is one case in Australia, there is a risk of an epidemic in Australia,” Prof Mackay said.
“Any outbreak can be traced to one person … no matter what it is, from an ebola emergence to a new coronavirus in the Middle East to this particular pandemic we’ve got right now.”
The Courier-Mail on Wednesday revealed that 185 people who had entered Queensland from interstate and overseas had provided police with fake names, numbers and addresses in bids to dodge mandatory quarantine.
Those actions, Prof Mackay warned, could “spoil the health of everybody, and spoil their freedom and spoil their job prospects, careers and livelihoods”.
“What’s happening in Victoria, we don’t want that to happen here and it could happen here,” he said.
“We all have to take responsibility … that means trying to abide by rules, guidelines, suggestions and laws.”
Despite the havoc it has wreaked, the coronavirus remains an anomaly for the most part that medical experts are still working to understand.
“We don’t know whether people that have had mild disease will end up having breathing problems … have cognitive issues … we don’t really know the full spectrum of impacts on the very young.”
And those are lessons, Prof Mackay stressed, we don’t want to learn the hard way.
“There are deaths occurring right across the spectrum of age, (but) there is (also) this long-term follow-up problem with health,” he said.
“If we have to try and save lives we will go back to lockdown.”
Originally published as ‘People are going to die’: Horror warning to border hoppers