‘The most serious threat in a year’

Education, healthcare, the NRL and Brisbane’s showpiece Ekka agricultural show have been plunged into uncertainty.

Farmer wait to parade their dairy cows at the Royal Queensland Show, also known as the Ekka, in Brisbane. Picture: Dan Peled

Education, healthcare, the NRL and Brisbane’s showpiece Ekka agricultural show have been plunged into uncertainty by a school-based Covid outbreak that forced the lockdown of nearly four million people in southeast Queensland.

Five schools at the centre of the emergency have been closed as contact tracers scramble to establish how the virus jumped from quarantined international travellers to an unvaccinated medical student, identified as the possible index patient for community spread.

Confirming nine new cases on Sunday, Deputy Premier Steven Miles said all involved the ultra-contagious Delta strain, bringing to 18 the number of people so far infected.

This posed the most serious threat to the state in a year, he warned.

Chief health officer Jeannette Young has ordered a week-long suspension of medical student placements in hospitals, potentially hitting staffing levels, given that trainee doctors and nurses are an important resource.

The Australian Medical Association said it backed the move.

Mystery surrounds how the female medical student was exposed. She is the key link in the chain of infection reaching back to two men who flew into Brisbane on June 29, travelling separately from Indonesia and Britain via Singapore.

Dr Young said genomic testing showed it was likely the virus spread from the traveller who was treated for Covid at the Sunshine Coast University Hospital north of Brisbane and discharged on July 17.

Someone in contact with him may have infected the University of Queensland medical student, but this “missing link” had not been nailed down.

A 17-year-old Indooroopilly High School student who was being tutored by the young woman transmitted the virus to four family members.

One of them, a child, attended nearby Ironside State School, where a teacher tested positive.

The school’s karate club was the conduit for it to spread to a boy from Brisbane Grammar School, who in turn infected his father.

By Sunday, Brisbane Girls Grammar School and St Peters Lutheran College in Indooroopilly had been told to shut by Queensland Health, though St ­Peters said it was in the dark as to why.

Internal Year 12 exams reportedly face cancellation if the lockdown extends beyond Tuesday in 11 local government areas across Brisbane, the Gold Coast and Sunshine Coast.

Confirming that the UQ medical student had not been vaccinated, although she was booked to get it, Dr Young said universities had been told trainees on hospital placement were part of the priority group.

“But I will be honest with you, my priority was actually healthcare workers,” she said.

“It was more important to get healthcare vaccinated and students came second.”

The National Rugby League, having uprooted teams from locked-down Sydney as well as the Melbourne Storm to a supposed Covid bubble in Queensland, was thrown into chaos when Saturday fixtures were abandoned.

The competition got back on track after Dr Young ticked off on revised biosecurity measures from the NRL and allowed the five ­affected games to go ahead on Sunday and Monday in front of empty grandstands.

Brisbane’s Royal National Agricultural and Industrial Association will be sweating on the case numbers stabilising after putting on hold preparations for the Ekka, which was cancelled last year because of the pandemic.

The show is meant to open to the public on Saturday but the plans of hundreds of livestock ­exhibitors and sideshow alley ­operators have been upended by the snap 72-hour lockdown.

The signs are not promising, given Dr Young’s decision to halt medical student placements for a week.

“This is the most … new community infections we have reported in Queensland in almost 12 months,” Mr Miles said.

“The last time we were at this level was August 2020.”