Coronavirus: NSW on verge of disaster on New Year’s Eve, says Raina MacIntyre

Top epidemiologist Raina MacIntyre warns that Sydney faces up to 3000 cases by January unless there is an immediate short and sharp lockdown.

‘New Year’s Eve is going to be the mother of all super-spreading events’. Raina MacIntyre

NSW is on the brink of disaster as it faces major COVID-19 superspreader events on Christmas Day and New Year’s Eve, a leading epidemiologist has warned, urging an immediate lockdown across greater Sydney if the infection rate is not down on Monday.

“New Year’s Eve is going to be the mother of all super-spreading events because the people who get infected on Christmas Day are going to be at their absolute maximum infectiousness on New Year’s Eve,” said UNSW Professor Raina MacIntyre.

“That’s a disaster waiting to happen.”

The biggest danger is that large numbers of people who are infectious but don’t know it — as around half of all infections are asymptomatic — will travel across Sydney on Christmas Day for lunch or dinner and infect others.

The R number — the number of people that one infected person will pass on a virus to — is about 3, but it may be higher at this time of the year because so many people are out mingling and socialising.

“So if we have 40 new cases on Monday that’ll be 120 new infections that those people pass on by Christmas Day,” Professor MacIntyre said.

Those people will be at the peak of their infectiousness on Christmas Day, she added. If they have lunch or dinner with family and friends they will in turn infect 360 people. Six days later, on New Year’s Eve, those 360 people will be out partying at the peak of infectiousness.

“That 360 cases becomes over 1000 cases on New Year’s Eve, so by the end of the first week of January we could be looking at 3000 cases,” she warned.

The answer, she said, is to act quickly, extending the northern beaches lockdown across greater Sydney if the case numbers are the same or bigger on Monday.

“We could avoid that situation, and even have a prospect of being able to celebrate Christmas with our families as we all want to, if we do a short sharp lockdown with the same restrictions we’ve got in the northern beaches now but for greater Sydney,” she said.

That could be reviewed by Thursday. “Given the prospect of potentially having a massive epidemic by January, it’s better to be safe than sorry, that the businesses that might have to have a short, sharp shut down, it’ll be saving them in the longer term so we’re not facing a three month lockdown like Melbourne.”

Professor MacIntyre was alarmed by reports of people waiting for five or six hours to get tested. “We’ve got to ramp up the testing capacity, you can’t have people wait for five or six hours, they’re just going to walk away.”

If case numbers are not down to single digits by Christmas Day, she said, the government should ban all indoor mass gatherings on New Year’s Eve. Wearing masks in public should be mandatory, she said. “Asking people — please will you do it, doesn’t work.”

NSW Chief Health officer Kerry Chant defended the government’s refusal to make masks compulsory. “People have sent me photos of supermarkets where the vast majority of people are wearing a mask,” she said. “So we have had a lot of co-operation from both the community and business.”