Coronavirus: Queensland holds fire on NSW border closures

Queensland is resisting pressure to close its border to the whole of NSW.

Quensland Chief Health Officer Jeannette Young. Picture: David Clark

Queensland is resisting pressure to close its border to the whole of NSW despite sewage tests ­revealing possible undetected community transmission.

The state did not follow the lead of other jurisdictions on Thursday in imposing further travel bans on NSW and Victorian residents, maintaining greater Sydney as the only hotspot, meaning its residents are barred from entering the state.

Chief Health Officer Jeannette Young said she was closely monitoring the NSW cluster and the new Victorian cases, and urged Queenslanders to rethink travel to those states.

“The next 24 hours are critical for Victoria, and the NSW cluster is growing daily. Queensland is in a good position right now ­because we acted quickly to ­declare greater Sydney a hotspot,” Dr Young said.

To ease congestion on the ­border, Queensland Police ­announced an additional checkpoint would be added in the new year to improve the flow of traffic coming from NSW, bringing the number of manned entry points to five.

Chief Superintendent Mark Wheeler said the new stop would relieve pressure on some of the Gold Coast’s busier roads, adding that emergency services would be given a code to access the road outside of operational hours. “At the moment, we have an extremely high volume of ­traffic across all road networks,” he said.

“There will be times when ambulances and other emer­gency vehicles will get caught up in traffic, that is not unusual.

“I can reassure everyone that at each and every checkpoint … there are methods in place to get people through.”

In the past week, 375 cars carrying 840 people have been turned around at the border. Most had attempted to enter from greater Sydney or were unable to prove they had not been in a hotspot in the past 14 days.

Queensland recorded three new cases of COVID-19 on Thursday, all in hotel quarantine and acquired in South Africa, India and Pakistan.

The virulent UK strain of the virus has been identified in a man in his 30s who recently ­returned from Ghana. He was transferred from hotel quarantine to hospital.

While maintaining the status quo on the border, concerns are continuing to rise around undetected community transmission in Queensland as sewage testing found traces of the virus at two more sites in the state’s southeast. Fragments of the virus were found at Bundamba in West Moreton and Merrimac on the Gold Coast through routine testing undertaken since Christmas Eve.