This was published 3 years ago
'Operating in the dark': A year since Australia's first public COVID-19 concerns
By Rachel Clun
It's been exactly one year since health authorities in Australia went public with their concerns over a new illness emerging from central China.
Unbeknown to them, January 19, 2020, was the same day the first case to be detected on our shores quietly arrived in Australia.
In fact, two other cases were already in the country.
Health Minister Greg Hunt, Prime Minister Scott Morrison, and then-chief medical officer Professor Brendan Murphy at a coronavirus press conference in March 2020.Credit: Alex Ellinghausen
Most Australians weren't familiar with the term "coronavirus", many didn't understand "contact tracing", and the idea of watching daily press conferences hoping for "doughnut days" was inconceivable.
January 19 was the first time we heard from then-chief medical officer Brendan Murphy about the novel coronavirus strain. He said the government was watching developments "very closely".
In a statement given to The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age that Sunday afternoon, he said there was "no cause for alarm in Australia", or for any travel advisory.
This was before social distancing. Before working from home, before hand sanitiser became ubiquitous. Before lockdowns or hotel quarantine, and more than two months before international borders were closed to everyone.
It was before the disease caused by the virus even had a name.
Then, there was much we didn't know about the virus later named SARS-CoV-2, which has since led to more than 95 million cases of COVID-19 around the world and 2 million lives lost.
A year ago we had a lot to learn about this new contagion. "We are operating in the dark to a certain degree," global health security expert Associate Professor Adam Kamradt-Scott told this masthead at the time.
The virus was first detected in late December 2019. On January 10 both the NSW and Victorian health departments had issued alerts to medical workers to be on the lookout for flu-like symptoms in people who had arrived from Wuhan.
By January 19, the number of laboratory-confirmed cases had jumped to 65, and the US had just begun screening passengers arriving from Wuhan for the new virus.
That day Professor Murphy said there was "no clear evidence" of human-to-human transmission, although it was emerging as a possibility.
"All confirmed cases have so far been people who have been in Wuhan, or visited Wuhan," he said.
A NSW Health spokesman said workers had been issued advice on how to prevent the spread of the coronavirus, in a statement that showed the state's confidence in the contact-tracing system soon regarded as the best in the country.
"NSW Health has developed and exercised a range of procedures for case finding, diagnosis, and contact tracing for high-consequence infectious diseases ... should they occur in NSW," the spokesman said on January 19, 2020.
Case numbers in China continued to balloon. Border protection talks began, and the Australian Health Protection Principal Committee met to discuss the nation's public health response.
It wasn't until January 25 that cases on Australian soil were confirmed. The first case was in a man who had arrived in Melbourne from Wuhan on January 19.
Following that news, Prime Minister Scott Morrison said it was "always expected" Australia would develop cases of the virus. Later that day, the first three cases were confirmed in NSW – all in people who had travelled from China in the days and weeks prior.
Another week later, on February 1, Australia put a two-week travel ban on arrivals from mainland China. Fifty weeks later, the ban spans the entire globe and may last that long again.