NSW Covid detectives keep Queensland border opening on track
NSW may have averted Queensland resetting the clock on the upcoming border opening.
NSW may have averted Queensland resetting the clock on the upcoming border opening by managing to trace all mystery COVID-19 cases diagnosed in recent days to a known source.
Five new cases of locally transmitted COVID-19 were confirmed in NSW on Friday, together with five cases in returned travellers in quarantine. All of the cases have been linked to known clusters, with a private health clinic in Liverpool, in Sydney’s southwest, the latest outbreak site. There are now seven cases associated with the clinic, but health authorities say three are in one household. One of the new cases diagnosed on Friday is a co-worker of an employee from the clinic.
Under Queensland’s plan for the easing of restrictions, the border with NSW will reopen on November 1 “provided community transmission is under control”, including whether there have been any mystery cases that are not linked to known outbreaks within the previous 28 days.
After NSW recorded three new locally acquired cases without a known source on Wednesday, Queensland Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk responded by giving NSW authorities 48 hours to trace the infections, otherwise the 28-day timeframe would be reset.
NSW had recorded 12 consecutive days of no community transmissions of COVID-19 prior to this week’s clusters.
NSW has now traced all of Wednesday’s mystery cases to known sources, and no COVID-19 cases are currently under investigation in the state.
NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian continued to express bewilderment at the 48-hour ultimatum. “I still don’t know where they got that 48-hour time limit from because, as we’ve seen during the pandemic, sometimes it takes Health just a few hours to identify a known link or a known source, and sometimes it takes up to days and weeks,” she said.
Queensland Chief Health Officer Jeannette Young said on Friday that health authorities in the state had not yet decided whether to push back the border reopening.
Dr Young also said reopening would depend on whether community transmitted cases in NSW were successfully traced. “NSW has extremely good contact-tracing capability and they’re using that at the moment,” she said.
“We just need to wait a bit longer before we decide whether or not there has been any need to change that planned opening to NSW that at this point in time is planned for the 1st of November.
“We use that 28 days of no unlinked community cases to assist us in determining whether it is safe … at the end of the month to open to another state.” The re-emergence of cases in NSW this week prompted fears of a wider outbreak, but infectious diseases professor Raina MacIntyre from the University of NSW’s Kirby Institute said all the indications were that the state would continue to contain the virus.
“The system here works, we’ve got good contact tracing, a well resourced health system, good testing rates,” Professor MacIntyre said. “It’s very promising that NSW has managed to contain the virus all this time since June.”
But Professor MacIntyre said the Liverpool private health clinic cluster indicated that community transmission had been occurring in Sydney, undetected during the days when no cases were officially recorded.
“That’s been rumbling along in the background and nobody has known about it, which means that you can get silent transmission,” she said.
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