Coronavirus: Indigenous elders ‘safer in the city before infections strike’

It is ‘almost inevitable’ the corona­virus will reach remote areas of South Australia and elders may be safer quarantined in towns.

APY Lands Council general manager Richard King.

It is “almost inevitable” the corona­virus will reach remote areas of South Australia and elders may be safer quarantined in towns, a medical director says.

Border controls aimed at keeping COVID-19 out were introduced in the state’s Anangu Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara Lands, but the general manager who introduced those rules, Richard King, said their main goal was to delay peak infections.

“Us locking our borders, ­restricting our movement, is really about us trying to avoid hitting our peak at the same time as mainstream Australia does … because the mainstream (system) is going to be inundated,” he said.

Federal and state governments last week imposed 14-day self-­isolation requirements on anyone entering about one-third of Western Australia, most of the Northern Territory and large areas of northern SA and far north Queensland. The rules were pitched as an ­attempt to prevent remote Aboriginal populations from contacting the coronavirus.

Mr King’s ­remarks are among the first public acknowledgments that that may be impossible.

In correspondence obtained by The Australian, Nganampa Health Council medical director Paul Torzillo wrote that remote community transmission was likely unavoidable. “At present, it is likely the (APY) Lands are safer than Adelaide,” he wrote. “We probably don’t have community transmission yet (but) it seems inevitable we will get community transmission at some time.”

Dr Torzillo was responding to a proposal he and NHC executive director John Singer supported, according to the correspondence, to move more than a dozen of the most vulnerable APY elders to ­Adelaide to be quarantined and cared for in a school.