Covid-19: ‘Stay home now or we’ll all be staying home longer’, say Queensland health authorities

Queensland faces a further extension of its lockdown beyond Sunday if the state’s Covid-19 outbreak continues to grow at its current rate.

Families flock to a pop-up Covid-19 testing centre in the car park of the Bluewater Village early learning centre at Trinity Beach in Cairns on Wednesday. Picture: Brendan Radke

Queensland faces a further extension of its lockdown beyond ­Sunday if the state’s Covid-19 ­outbreak continues to grow at its current rate.

Only two of 16 new cases reported on Wednesday did not spend time in the community while infectious, increasing the likelihood the outbreak could multiply exponentially.

There are now 63 cases linked to the cluster around Indooroopilly in Brisbane’s inner west, mostly spreading through school students and their families.

Among those in quarantine are more than 400 Queensland Health staff, putting the state’s health system under increased pressure.

All the new cases have been linked to an infection source, although there is still a missing link between a family of five, who tested positive last week, and two ­people who arrived from overseas earlier in July.

Chief health officer Jeannette Young said the lockdown of 11 government areas in the southeast, which was supposed to end on Tuesday, was unlikely to be lifted until there were no new cases detected outside of quarantine or isolation.

Dr Young said ending the lockdown was a “big challenge” that required extra precautions and urged people to reconsider leaving home or making online purchases to prevent the need for delivery workers to travel.

“Please, everyone, just think what you could do to just stay at home for the next few days until Sunday because it would be really good if we could lift it,” she said.

“That’s a big challenge, though, when I look at other states and how long it’s taken before they could lift their restrictions. If we don’t do something really, really, really special in Queensland, we’ll be extending the lockdown.”

Authorities were given a slight reprieve after genomic sequencing revealed a Cairns maritime pilot was believed to have picked up the virus from a ship and not in the community.

His positive test on Tuesday sparked concerns that the virus circulating in Brisbane had spread into the far north.

“It is not the Delta strain that is circulating in Brisbane and it hasn’t clustered with any other known case of Delta in Queensland,” Dr Young said.

Police at Main Beach on the Gold Coast check travellers. Picture: Liam Kidston

The man, who had two vaccin­ation doses, was shedding low amounts of the virus, Dr Young said, and his partner and child have tested negative.

The Queensland Tourism Industry Council has issued an ­urgent plea to the federal government to extend the eligibility of the Covid-19 disaster payment to employees of tourism and hos­pitality businesses in locations outside locked-down areas and for the state government to review fees and charges imposed on ­businesses.

“Our recent communications with operators paint a bleak picture of the current state of business and the immediate to long term economic outlook for the sector,” QTIC chief executive Daniel Gschwind said.

“The industry ended the last ­financial year severely emaciated financially and with no reserves but with a glimmer of hope and optimism that ‘the worst’ might be behind us.

“Such expectations have now been comprehensively dashed,” he said.

“Tourism relies on the movement of people to function.”