Musings about Controlling Covid - Australia January 2021

 

It is now the fourth wave of Covid spread in Sydney.
Once Covid leaks through from overseas arrivals on plane or ship to the local community, it is harder to contain, without hitting hard and early on focused movement restrictions for an interim period.

Once Covid reappears in the local community, better mental health is attained by confident and reassuring measures to stop its spread, much better than attending the much respected cricket games.

The risks of Covid spreading from the latest Avalon, Croydon and Berala clusters can impact on inadequate infrastructure and resources to optimally manage further infection break outs beyond the borders of the Sydney Basin.

In almost 4 weeks since the reporting of the Avalon cluster in Sydney's northern beaches, around 270 exposure sites have been traced for NSW and another hundred in Victoria - and counting.

Despite this reality, the free movement of people continues, even when for NSW residents, up to 200 infections have been identified in the state since the middle of December 2020.

In contrast, Hebei Province was totally locked down with severe movement restrictions immediately, after a lesser number of infections occured this past week in a city in its south.

The Queensland state government today declared a three day severe lockdown for a defined area of Brisbane and selected suburbs (instead of blanketing other non-relevant areas)  from 6pm their time, just after a quarantine hotel cleaner was confirmed to have contracted the rather more infectious UK mutated strain of Covid.

Most Australian states have imposed hard border controls to prevent NSW residents from coming, perhaps echoing their serious concerns on how relaxed the NSW government has been reacting to Covid cases and its spread in its own backyard.

A swift and strict lockdown for a short period can be more effective to dispel uncertainty than an approach wavering on varying daily case figures.

Contact tracing and extensive testing are only ways of managing public health after the Covid has bolted in.

Prevention is best, by stopping leakages. It is effective to stop overseas arrivals, especially on a temporary basis, emphatically in view of much more infectious versions of Covid jumping inside the country to locally transmit through direct contact staff and transport drivers without adequate PPE physically in touch with infected arrivals.

Local individuals working face on with overseas arrivals need to face a more stringent regime of daily testing and not being able to spread Covid back to their families, vulnerable work sites like aged care homes and indoor venues like shopping and medical hubs.

AEDT 4 pm, 8 January 2021, Sydney NSW.

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