Coronavirus: Race to bolster defence against UK virus strain

Scott Morrison will urgently ­reconvene national cabinet on Friday as authorities move to stop the spread of Britain’s new coronavirus strain.

Scott Morrison said the national cabinet would discuss how to ‘further strengthen the COVID safety of end-to-end international travel processes’. Picture: Gary Ramage

Scott Morrison will urgently ­reconvene national cabinet on Friday, a month earlier than it was scheduled, as health authorities move to stop the spread of Britain’s new highly infectious coronavirus strain to Australia.

The Prime Minister on Wednesday said he had sought advice from Chief Medical Officer Paul Kelly and the nation’s expert medical panel on how to strengthen international border arrangements in a bid to stop a local outbreak of the strain.

The proposal, to be discussed by the Australian Health Protection Principal Committee on Thursday, is expected to include a requirement that travellers from London be tested before boarding a flight to Australia.

The new COVID-19 strain, which some studies suggest is ­between 50 per cent and 74 per cent more infectious, has been detected in at least 10 travellers from Britain in the past month.

Dozens of countries have closed their borders to Britain, ­although some, including France, have now eased those restrictions.

More than one million people in Britain now have COVID-19, with over 60,000 new cases recorded in a single day on Tuesday, as the country enters a total lockdown in a bid to stem the outbreak.

There were five new locally transmitted cases in Australia on Wednesday — four in NSW.

Mr Morrison has already spoken to Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews about new safeguards, while West Australian Premier Mark McGowan separately called for national cabinet to be brought forward from February 5 to discuss the issue and the vaccine rollout.

“In terms of banning people out of Britain, if the health advice to the nation’s governments recommended that than I would support that, but at this point in time we don’t have that recommendation,” Mr McGowan said.

On Wednesday, WA officials said two healthcare staff and an airport worker were in quarantine after coming in contact with an elderly woman with COVID-19 while not wearing personal protective equipment. She had returned from Britain days earlier.

Mr Morrison said the discussions would be about how to “further strengthen the COVID safety of end-to-end international travel processes”. “This is being done particularly in the context of the UK strain,” he said.

The NSW government has faced growing calls to toughen quarantine protections, with Victoria demanding all states follow its lead in compulsory testing of airline crews and even floating the possibility of an outright ban on flights from Britain.

NSW Chief Health Officer Kerry Chant defended the government’s rules — and said flight crews were now required to go into hotel quarantine, with exceptions for those resident in NSW — but on Wednesday would not commit to mandatory testing of airline staff. “We’ll be engaging with the airlines on flight crew testing,” she said. “It’s important to focus on the key risks. The experience in the other jurisdictions has been that by the time the test result comes back, the flight crew, who are ­usually on very tight 24-hour turnarounds, have actually ­departed.”

But Tony Blakely, an epidemiologist at the University of Melbourne, said the failure to immediately enforce testing of flight crews was “mad bonkers”.

“There should be mandatory testing of all aircrew as they come back,” he said. “We do not want this variant to get out, because if it gets out, we’re going to have to hit it with a sledgehammer to stamp it out — or fail to stamp it out, and then we can start drifting towards what other countries look like.”

Victoria has demanded all states follow its lead in compulsory testing of airline crews. Picture: Sam Mooy

Under Victoria’s tightened controls, 1096 flight crew members have gone into hotel quarantine in two weeks, with eight testing positive for coronavirus.

Victorian Police Minister Lisa Neville on Tuesday said this was well over the average for returned travellers and constituted a significant risk to Australia and suggested British travellers could be banned from Victoria.

Professor Blakely said closing Australia’s borders had to be an option. “If I was the chief medical officer, and I wasn’t comfortable the quarantine was heaps better than just two months ago, I would be seriously considering this move, at least until we get border staff vaccinated,” he said, although he noted that he did not have all information available to public health officials.

In the meantime, he said, the minimum requirement was for mandatory testing before passengers boarded in London.

Bill Bowtell, an infectious diseases expert and a researcher at the University of NSW, said he also thought flights from Britain should be stopped. “And certainly nobody should be on those flights without a negative test,” he said. “And there should be no exemptions at the airports.”

Professor Bowtell said a new South African coronavirus variant was more worrying than the British strain because there were early indications it was resistant to the current range of vaccines.

Scientists believe the South African variant is more infectious than the British strain. Australia detected its first case of the South African variant on December 22 in Brisbane.