Kids to get jab as Covid-19 crisis grows

Vulnerable children will be offered the Covid vaccine under revised medical advice to the federal government.

Deep-cleaning operations at Ironside State School at St Lucia, the centre of Brisbane’s Delta outbreak and South East Queensland’s extended lockdown. Picture: David Clark

Vulnerable children will be offered the Covid vaccine under revised medical advice to the federal government, as Brisbane’s widening schools outbreak dramatically exposes the threat of the Delta strain to the very young.

A third of the 31 infections so far linked to the schools cluster in Brisbane are of children aged nine years or under, the first time the virus has broken into an underage population in this country.

With new cases doubling day by day, the Queensland government extended the existing 72-hour lockdown of the state capital, the Gold Coast and Sunshine Coast to Sunday, amid warnings case numbers would surge.

Brisbane’s showpiece Ekka agricultural show, due to open on Saturday, was cancelled and a seventh school listed as an exposure site. Defence Minister Peter Dutton went into home quarantine after a son’s school was caught up in the outbreak.

Queensland chief health officer Jeannette Young said many more cases of community transmission were anticipated: “So yes, unfortunately, this outbreak is escalating.”

Federal Health Minister Greg Hunt said the Australian Technical Advisory Group on Immunisation, which guides vaccine policy, recommended 220,000 12 to 15-year-olds with immune-compromising conditions such as cancer have the imported Pfizer shot. Indigenous children and under-15s in remote areas could also be vaccinated from next Monday.

Deputy chief medical officer Michael Kidd said record numbers of young adults had been hospitalised during the emergency in Sydney. Voicing concern with the situation there and in Brisbane, he said: “What we’re also seeing … is a larger number of young adults who’ve been infected with Covid-19 being hospitalised and increased numbers ending up in intensive care units, and certainly at much higher levels than we saw, during, for example, the very serious outbreak in Victoria at this time last year. That’s why it’s important that we bring these outbreaks under control.”

Children were largely unaffected by the original wild strain of the virus, but the virulence of Delta has heightened the risk to them. Infectious disease experts urged health authorities to change tack to counter this.

Epidemiologist and World Health Organisation Covid control group member Mary-Louise McLaws said teens and young adults had to be given priority.

“The authorities shouldn’t just be recently woke to this problem,” she said. “It has been an issue in the UK and the US … they should have been watching what was happening overseas.”

At the very least, children should wear masks at school, said Paul Griffin, a physician and microbiologist with the University of Queensland: “While the previous advice wasn’t wrong, based on our past experience, this is a learning point from which we should change and focus on mitigating strategies also, particularly for the older school-aged children.”

Since the initial case of community transmission was confirmed last Thursday in a 17-year-old student from Indooroopilly High School in Brisbane’s inner- west, the daily rate of new infections increased to 13 on Monday. Four were from the same family.

As well as the 10 children and teenager who have tested positive, there was a case in the 20-29 age group and three aged 30-39.

St Aidan’s Anglican Girls School in Corinda and Pullenvale State School were added to the list of exposure sites on Monday as Dr Young pleaded with nearly four million people subject to stay-at-home orders to observe the rules. There are confirmed cases among students, teachers or their close contacts at Ironside State School in St Lucia, nearby Indooroopilly High School, Brisbane Grammar School and Brisbane Girls Grammar School.

“I really am very, very concerned about these … schools,” Dr Young said. “We know Delta is much more likely to spread among younger people.

“And although they’re less likely to do particularly badly if they get infected – they’re less likely to die – they are more likely to transmit to other people.”

Prof McLaws, of the University of NSW, said the virulence of the Delta variant, considered 60 per cent more contagious than the wild virus and capable of transmitting with a much heavier viral load, was hitting children and young people harder.