Coronavirus Australia: window to act closing, biosecurity expert warns
Australia’s coronavirus health crisis will mirror Italy and the US within weeks and will get even worse without extreme social distancing measures, biosecurity expert warns.
Australia’s coronavirus health crisis will mirror those of Italy and the US within weeks and will get even worse without extreme social distancing measures, one of the nation’s top biosecurity experts has warned.
University of NSW professor Raina MacIntyre said South Korea and China were the only countries that had successfully flattened the infection “curve”.
China did it by locking its population down for eight weeks. South Korea instituted targeted social distancing, lockdowns of heavily-affected areas, a massive testing program and extensive contact tracing.
“We’ve got to go hard and go now. The window is closing,” Ms MacIntyre told The Australian.
“We are not flattening the curve. We are on the sharp upward, almost vertical growth phase.
“We don’t have months and months to think about it.
“In three weeks’ time it’s going to be much worse than anyone can imagine.”
In Italy, COVID-19 infections surged from about 400 cases on February 27 to more than 53,000, including more than 4800 dead.
The US has recorded more than 25,000 cases, 323 of them fatal, prompting states including New York and California to order lockdowns of all non-essential workers.
“We are a couple of weeks behind Italy, but we are heading to Italy. We are a few weeks behind the US. We can see our future in front of our eyes,” Professor MacIntyre said.
“Surely we can learn from the mistakes that were made there, which were not testing widely enough, and not using social distancing?”
She said Singapore’s early success in slowing the spread of the virus was no longer supported by the data.
It managed to keep its infection numbers low in the early stages, like Taiwan and Hong Kong. But all three of the small Asian states were now showing an uptick in cases.
“It’s far too early for them to be congratulating themselves in Singapore,” she said.
She said Australia had to get serious about social distancing, including closing schools, because of a shortage of testing kits and personal protection equipment.
“I’m getting reports from doctors in hospitals that unless they are working in emergency or the ICU, they can’t get a mask. So they have patients who are coughing on them right now,” Professor MacIntyre said.
“In two weeks time it’s going to be a lot worse. And by mid-April we are going to have an even worse situation, exposing our health workers to infection without adequate protection.”
Australian health authorities have sourced an extra 100,000 coronavirus test kits. But NSW alone conducted 500,000 influenza tests last year alone.
As of Sunday, more than 307,200 people had been infected by the virus worldwide, including more than 13,000 deaths.
Italian Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte told the nation he was tightening a lockdown and shutting down all production facilities except those providing essential goods and services. He cautioned citizens to be calm and patient, saying there was no alternative.
In Britain, Prime Minister Boris Johnson warned the National Health Service was in danger of being “overwhelmed” in the same way as the Italian healthcare system unless people heeded government advice on “social distancing”.
In the US, where multiple states have ordered residents to stay indoors, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo said the government was “literally scouring the globe looking for medical supplies”.
But the Chinese city of Wuhan, where the disease was first detected, went for a fourth consecutive day on Sunday without reporting any new or suspected cases of the virus, following a lockdown of its entire population.
