Covid menace in check as NSW gears up for 2021

Slowly but surely, NSW appears to be winning the battle against coronavirus on Sydney’s northern beaches. After the testing of another 24,000 people in 24 hours, seven new locally acquired cases were reported on Sunday morning. The skills and tireless work of the state’s testing and contact-tracing teams, outlined by NSW Chief Health Officer Dr Kerry Chant, are impressive and reassuring. Such efforts managed to avert a COVID-19 catastrophe at Christmas. And, at this stage, it has avoided a major surge in cases with serious social and economic disruption. While inconvenient, the restrictions in place in Sydney remain proportionate to the threat the virus poses to lives, health, jobs and the economy. On Sunday, local councils’ erection of blockades around areas normally packed on New Year’s Eve as vantage points for viewing the city’s fireworks spectacular suggests most people will be watching on television. Unnecessary risks through potential super-spreading must be avoided. What has made the outbreak, which totalled 122 cases by Sunday, more onerous are the unnecessary and costly hard border closures against the Greater Sydney area by other states at peak school holiday time.

There are no health orders stopping beaches being open for swimming, exercise or recreation, NSW Health has made clear. Northern beaches residents may also leave home to shop, work, seek medical attention or for compassionate reasons. But there is no room for complacency. Suburbs well outside the area, including Balmain, Rozelle and Drummoyne, are among new venues added to the NSW Health alerts list. And health authorities are no closer to tracking down the original source of the cluster.

A lockdown like that imposed by Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews during Melbourne’s second wave would be insufferable. Access to beaches, however, does not excuse the selfish and loutish behaviour of about 200 backpackers who crowded into an illegal beach party at Byron Bay on Sunday, leaving piles of rubbish behind. Just hours earlier, health authorities had warned that mass gatherings could easily become “super-spreader events”. The impromptu gathering at Bronte Beach in Sydney’s eastern suburbs on Christmas Day, broken up by riot police, was equally stupid. Those tempted to attend such events should look at the predicaments of those across the US, Britain, Europe and other nations to grasp what is at stake. More than 80 million people worldwide have had COVID-19 and the virus has claimed 1.7 million lives. In the US, 330,000 people — about one in 1000 Americans — have died from among 18.8 million cases. Britain, in the grip of a highly infectious new strain of the virus reportedly brought in from South Africa, recorded 34,693 new COVID cases on Boxing Day. And that was despite widespread business closures and tight limits on socialising.

EU nations began vaccinating their most vulnerable groups of citizens on Sunday as a reputedly more contagious coronavirus variant spread internationally, and the World Health Organisation warned that the current pandemic would not be the last.

Australians have much to be thankful for. But our gratitude does not extend to sharing the admiration of the Chinese Communist Party Politburo, which has congratulated itself on its “extremely extraordinary” success in handling the COVID-19 outbreak. “At the critical moment … the Party Central Committee took a long-term view … achieving an extremely extraordinary glory in this extremely unusual year,” state news agency Xinhua reported after the two-day Politburo meeting. China boasts it has crushed the virus, a claim that might or might not be true. The CCP’s statement comes ahead of a World Health Organisation probe into the disease’s origins. Scott Morrison was one of the first international leaders to urge such an investigation — a call that appears to have triggered the CCP’s trade retaliation against imports from Australia. At the same time, by coincidence, a Chinese citizen journalist, Zhang Zhan, who reported on Wuhan’s outbreak, has been detained since May and is expected to go on trial on Monday. Ms Zhang is a former lawyer who travelled to Wuhan in February to report on the early stages of the outbreak through social media platforms that are banned in China.

From 253,235 COVID tests in NSW last week, 61 new cases were identified. The source of 53 cases is known; but not of the other eight. Ongoing high levels of testing are vital, as Dr Chant and NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian point out. Extensive testing adds to the confidence of medical authorities and the public that new strands of the insidious disease are not making their way through the community undetected.