No coronavirus second wave on the Queensland horizon

The woman in charge of Queensland’s response to COVID-19 has said she does not believe the state will experience a second wave of the disease.

Queensland Chief Health Officer Jeannette Young. Picture: Annette Dew

The woman in charge of Queensland’s response to COVID-19 has said she does not believe the state will experience a second wave of the disease.

Chief Health Officer Jeannette Young has gone from being terrified of how the spread of the virus was “out of control” in late March to being confident the state has done enough to conquer its spread.

Dr Young told a parliamentary hearing into the state government’s response to the pandemic that her one concern was that too few people were coming forward to get tested for the virus.

However, she said this might be because there was “next to no” respiratory illnesses in the state.

Queensland recorded just six cases of influenza last week at a time of year when it would normally have to deal with thousands, she said. “I believe given the measured steps that we’ve taken, and the fact that we have those three initiatives in place that the Prime Minister said needed to be in place before we remove restrictions, that we will not have a second wave,” she told state parliament’s economic and governance committee.

She said Queensland had achieved the three measures ­needed to prevent a second wave: ­adequate capacity to test for the virus; contact-tracing ability to stop its spread; and rapid response to known cases to prevent clusters.

However, Dr Young said she remained reluctant to reopen Queensland to interstate travellers despite Australia’s Deputy Chief Medical Officer Paul Kelly’s insistence that there was no ­medical reason why the borders should still be closed.

She said she had “more granular information” than Dr Kelly had at a national level.

“On the 21st of March in Queensland, we were reporting 67 cases … and each day until the 28th of March we were reporting ­between 55 and 67 cases.

“We were doubling the number of cases in Queensland every four days, which from my point of view was terrifying, so we had to act.”

She said once the federal government had closed international borders, the next threat to Queensland communities was carriage of the virus across state borders.

“It (the border shutdown) was a very successful strategy of protecting Queenslanders from exposure to people bringing the infection back in Queensland.”

Queensland Health director-general John Wakefield told the committee that Queensland and Australia generally were “well ahead” in their preparations to fight the virus by the time the World Health Organisation ­declared a global pandemic on March 11.

The state had used modelling to plan for about one million Queenslanders to contract the virus, with 200,000 needing to be hospitalised and 50,000 requiring intensive care. “Estimates of deaths from those early days varied from 1 per cent to over 3 per cent. That is between 10,000 and 30,000 Queenslanders who could have died,” he said.

He said the government had budgeted $1.2bn to triple emergency capacity and double intensive care capacity of hospitals.