NSW private hospital staff join Covid-19 jab force

NSW Health has asked private hospitals to pause non-urgent elective surgery to bolster the state’s Covid-19 response, after daily infection numbers spiked on Wednesday.

NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian in Sydney on Wednesday. Picture: Joel Carrett

NSW Health has asked private hospitals to pause non-urgent elective surgery to bolster the state’s Covid-19 response, after daily infection numbers spiked on Wednesday and officials warned of further increases in coming days.

Health staff from 40 private hospitals are expected to be re­deployed as part of a “large-scale vaccination effort” that is continuing across the state, but also to support what officials described as increasing demand that was being experienced across the public health system.

Non-urgent surgery has already been placed on hold in public hospitals across Greater Sydney and regional NSW.

The move to do so in the private system indicates the heightened level of urgency and strain on resources.

Official said urgent elective and emergency surgeries would continue. “This decision has the full support of the commonwealth government through the commonwealth Department of Health, which has agreed the temporary suspension of non-­urgent elective surgery to free up staff to support the pandemic response,” NSW Health said in a statement.

Wednesday marked a rise in daily infections, with 633 cases announced and 92 known to be active in the community; another 475 cases are under investigation for their isolation status.

Officials said the virus reproduction number was sitting at 1.3, meaning for every 10 people infected another 13 were likely to contract the virus.

They said driving this number down remained the priority and an eventual indicator of success.

Questioned by reporters, Premier Gladys Berejiklian said she stood by her government’s current lockdown settings, which had failed to curb spiking daily case numbers and on Wednesday included three more fatalities from the virus.

They included a man in his 60s from southwestern Sydney who contracted the virus from a cluster that emerged at Liverpool Hospital, where he was a patient in the geriatric ward. Another two men, both in their 70s, died at ­Nepean Hospital.

Officials said cases remained driven by essential workers who were contracting the disease and transmitting it to members of their household, along with ­people who were said to be spreading the virus through compliance breaches.

Of the cases announced, 87 per cent - 550 cases - were detected in western and southwestern Sydney; officials said police officers had issued more than 400 fines during the same 24-hour period.

NSW chief health officer Kerry Chant deflected questions on whether she had provided advice to the Premier to tighten the state’s existing lockdown settings to bring them in line with those of Victoria, where a nightly curfew and outdoor masks have been introduced.

“The Premier and I are both committed, passionately, to seeing the case numbers decline. We have a shared vision,” Dr Chant said. “I can’t comment any further than to say the Premier, in all my discussions with her, is absolutely committed to increasing vaccine coverage and getting low community transmission.”

Customer Service Minister Victor Dominello issued an apology on Wednesday for extended delays that have seen businesses miss out on receiving Covid-19 fin­ancial support while they remain shuttered by the lockdown.

He said his department had received 260,000 applications for support, of which 200,000 had been approved, although a large number remain unpaid. Another 60,000 applications were being assessed for further information.

He apologised “to all the businesses that did not receive their grants on time, or did not receive phone calls when they should have expected phone calls”.

“The quality of service we provided over the last month is not up to standard,” he said.

Businesses that called Service NSW faced telephone wait times of more than two hours, which were reduced last week to 18 minutes and had since been reduced through increased staffing to less than 10 minutes.