Entire NSW town of Wilcannia told to get tested for Covid-19 and stay home

Wilcannia residents ordered to get tested for Covid-19 after an infected person attended a funeral in the NSW community.

Defence personnel deliver food packages to Indigenous people in lockdown in Dubbo in central NSW. Picture: Ryan Osland

The entire town of Wilcannia has been ordered to get tested for Covid-19 after an infected person travelled to the remote community for the funeral of a young ­Aboriginal man and spread the virus to other mourners.

Health authorities held serious concerns for the 745 residents of the river town in western NSW and turned the local football oval into a makeshift testing centre on Wednesday. Locals were being told to get tested and to isolate at home.

The western NSW outbreak had infected 142 people by Wednesday morning, 67 per cent of them Indigenous.

Contact tracers have established that a person with Covid-19 drove six hours from Dubbo to attend the funeral service at St John the Apostle in Wilcannia on Friday last week.

The Australian has been told the church was full and about 30 mourners spilled outside. A local Aboriginal man and woman and their youngest child have since tested positive.

They were in good health late on Wednesday and an older child from the household, thought to be aged 11, had tested negative.

“People are angry that someone brought this to our community,” said one Aboriginal man Brendan Adams, who runs the town’s radio station from his home of 20 years in Wilcannia. “There is a lot of fear,” he added.

The western and central NSW outbreak has heavily affected the young, with 40 per cent of all cases so far aged between 10 and 19. No one in the region over 70 is known to have tested positive.

The vast majority of cases are in Dubbo, where the Australian Defence Force arrived on Wednesday to help deliver supplies of food and other essentials to people in lockdown. Five ADF teams of medics and other health workers will also help the Aboriginal medical services that are already testing and vaccinating people in their homes.

 

The district’s chief health executive Scott McLachlan confirmed on Wednesday that Dubbo’s hospital was under strain as the number of people ill with Covid-19 in western NSW increased from two on Tuesday to five on Wednesday. All of them were adults and none was in intensive care. There were about 130 people with Covid-19 in western NSW who were under the supervision of clinical teams while at home, he said.

“We do have some stress and pressure on our intensive care units across the region at the ­moment. That is a typical winter … people getting crook in winter,” he said.

The western NSW outbreak, which has reached Broken Hill, has forced attention on the gap in the Covid-19 vaccination rates of Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal Australians. While more than 25 per cent of the general population has had two Covid-19 vaccinations, only 15 per cent of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people have had both shots.

After advice in June that Pfizer was preferred for people under 60, the availability of Pfizer became a key issue in communities with big Indigenous populations because more than 90 per cent of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people are under 60.

Some communities such as Brewarrina, 760km from Sydney, were chosen as Pfizer hubs in the months before the outbreak in western NSW. The tiny town’s Aboriginal Medical Service, which has a staff of four, has been able to vaccinate about 600 people from Brewarrina and its surrounding communities over the past six weeks.

Brewarrina doctor Sonia Henry said she was proud that she and her colleagues did this important work while also looking after the other health needs of about 800 locals, many of them with diabetes and on dialysis.

“On any given day our waiting room was packed with patients who had travelled hundreds of kilometres to be given the Pfizer vaccine,” Dr Henry said.