![]() ![]() Mandatory masks are also a sensible idea - many passengers were already wearing them so this about making it mandatory and consistent across all carriers. While it’s impossible to rule out that positive cases will arrive among returned travellers, particularly from the UK, it will undoubtedly reduce the proportion of arrivals who are positive, and PCR testing is much more reliable than screening for symptoms. It is still possible passengers or crew will bring the virus into Australia as some may still be incubating an infection when in transit. This is a good way of taking the pressure off our returnee quarantine process, although it will not eliminate the risk entirely. Testing positive for a test completes within 72 hours of a flight will rule that passenger, and any of their household contacts, from boarding the flight. National Cabinet has also announced a series of new measures aimed at reducing the risks associated with air travel and the potential arrival of COVID cases among returned travellers.Īll passengers will be required to test negative before boarding a flight to Australia, and masks will be mandatory on all international and domestic flights and inside airports. This would have removed the risks associated with her subsequent movements in the community. Instead, the woman who is believed to have been infectious since January 2 would have tested positive on her last shift that day, rather than when she developed symptoms several days later. With more frequent testing, we wouldn’t have the situation we have in Queensland. The Victorian government has already applied it, and National Cabinet has now established this as the the national standard. When we had the Adelaide outbreak, I advocated for daily testing, or testing on each shift, to be the national testing standard for all workers on the quarantine frontline. The fact that Melbourne’s lockdown successfully suppressed within a matter of weeks a new “mutant” strain with some of the same genetic changes as the UK variant, while the variant responsible for more than 99% of the second wave was a supposedly less infectious strain, shows that what matters most is the how the epidemic seeds, where transmission is established and how it is controlled, not just the COVID strain itself.įinally at zero new cases, Victoria is on top of the world after unprecedented lockdown effortīrisbane’s current situation does show the value of more frequent testing of hotel quarantine staff. Then, the fact this strain spreads more rapidly would become a danger. It would make a difference if case numbers climbed or the virus got into workplaces and began to get a foothold in the community. With a low number of cases, it doesn’t make much of a difference which variant is responsible. The protocol for handling a situation like this should be the same regardless of whether the “UK superstrain” is involved or not. Does it matter that the ‘UK superstrain’ is involved here? But it just seems to be an instinctive human reaction that can’t be prevented. It’s actually the panic-buying that causes the shortages in supply. We wouldn’t wish Melbourne’s situation on anybody, but they have shown it is possible to live with lockdown. ![]() We’ve seen how these things play out - the empty shelves and toilet paper shortages. That meant isolating everyone until the continual seeding back into the community could be stopped.īrisbane’s shorter lockdown allows health authorities to find and test anyone who might, for instance, have been on public transport with the one woman we know has been infected so far. ![]() Melbourne’s lockdown, in contrast, was about suppressing viral transmission from cases that numbered in the thousands and where workplaces were the main driver of spread. In Brisbane’s case, it’s just a circuit-breaker designed to immediately minimise everyone’s number of close contacts until we can establish whether anyone has caught the virus from the one known case: a hotel quarantine cleaner who was moving around in the community for five days before testing positive yesterday. Greater Brisbane’s 72-hour COVID lockdown, which takes effect at 6pm on Friday, has a crucial difference from the months-long lockdown endured by Melbourne earlier this year, or the current restrictions aimed at stamping out Sydney’s COVID clusters. ![]()
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