Papua New Guinea: ‘a catastrophe waiting to happen’

Experts warn Australia must respond to the escalating COVID-19 crisis or risk the situation ballooning into a catastrophe on our doorstep.

PNG's Prime Minister James Marape. Picture: PNG PM Media

Australia must respond to the ­escalating COVID-19 crisis in Papua New Guinea with an ­urgent deployment of emergency medical and vaccination teams or risk the situation ballooning into a health and security catastrophe on our doorstep, experts have warned.

PNG’s health system is already near collapse amid a rapid spread of infection that has overwhelmed Port Moresby’s general hospital, and now threatens other vulnerable Pacific communities including the Solomon Islands, West Papua and Australia’s Torres Strait Islands.

Six COVID-positive Australians were hospitalised in Cairns this month after arriving on a charter flight from PNG’s Ok Tedi mine, while a significant number of the 51 cases detected in Queensland’s hotel quarantine system in March are Australian expatriates and fly in-fly out workers returning from the impoverished country.

“This could be the beginning of a potentially much bigger movement of people,” Australian Strategic Policy Institute executive director Peter Jennings warned on Sunday, pointing to the proximity and traditional trade between PNG’s Western Province — where infections are also spiralling — and the Torres Strait.

“We are talking about a country which is very fragile to begin with and if the virus really takes hold in a way that can’t be handled by PNG itself, Australia will inevitably be required to step in in a way I don’t think China or any other country would be interested in doing. If it is really bad — and it looks like it’s becoming that — this could play into PNG politics and increase the risk of instability in the streets.”

COVID-19 case numbers in PNG, which has the world’s sixth lowest testing rate per capita, have doubled in a month to 1819 and health experts fear mass gatherings to mark the death of former prime minister Michael Somare will dramatically exacerbate infections.

China last week deployed a medical team to Port Moresby to help in its COVID-19 effort amid reports that more than 60 staff had tested positive for COVID-19 at the city’s main hospital, and that new patients were being turned away and told to self-isolate.

Australia has allocated more than $600m towards the distribution of COVID-19 vaccinations in the Pacific and Southeast Asia, and at the weekend’s meeting of Quad leaders committed to overseeing vaccination logistics for the entire region.

But Dr Jennings said the federal government was reacting too slowly to PNG’s unfolding disaster and should deploy Australian ­Defence Force medics and a hospital ship, potentially backed by private medical contractors, this week.

“What the government is doing is commendable but I suspect it’s not as much as we will in short order feel we need to do, and we will be scrambling to catch up with a potentially far bigger problem than what might have been there earlier,” Dr Jennings said.

“There is a complexity of factors at play: China’s attempts to ­reduce Australia’s influence in the region, potential instability in Port Moresby”, Torres Strait infection risks, and the inevitability that it will be Australia that deals with the repercussions of a collapsed health system and resulting social instability.

Brendan Crabb, an infectious disease expert and head of Melbourne’s Burnet Institute for medical research, has backed calls for an emergency medical deployment but said the government must also immediately begin vaccinating all PNG health workers to augment Queensland’s fast-tracked vaccination rollout in the Torres Strait.

While it was “hard to fault” the federal government’s regional vaccination program, he feared it had not grasped the urgency of the situation in PNG and the potential for it to blow out into a “catastrophic” humanitarian disaster.

“It is speed that matters now, not just Australia’s response per se,” Professor Crabb said. “There will be a big price to pay if this is not quashed.”

Additional reporting: Charlie Peel