Moving at speed, planning for the worst, hoping for something better
There’s now no getting away from the spread of the coronavirus COVID-19 and Queensland is as exposed as any other Australian state, if not more so.
When Queensland Chief Health Officer Jeanette Young met with the Palaszczuk Cabinet on Monday afternoon she did not sugarcoat things – on current estimates as many as one in four people in the state would contract the COVID-19 this year, with one in three being a more likely outcome.
It wouldn’t be the same level of severity for all (with cases ranging from little more than cold or flu-like symptoms to deadly pneumonia infections) but, as cases of community transmission emerge in Australia, it’s going to be impossible to stop.
Young, who also heads up preventative health, has set up a war-room-like operation that reaches out to GPs and institutions where risks are high, such as universities.
Governments are moving to invoke emergency powers. In Queensland, the State Government last month extended the time authorities could impose specific measures, including those used against individuals, from a week to three months.
South Australia is today rushing through new laws to give police the power to arrest people infected who fail to abide by any other. The Commonwealth Attorney-General Christian Porter said this morning similar control orders, aimed at individuals, could be extended nationwide.
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“These are challenging times going forward and these will be some of the first times these important powers may be used,” Porter said, adding the government may be forced to use the laws under the Biosecurity Act.
We could see large groups of people detained at specific locations for a particular period of time, such as a “human health response zone”, similar to that activated for the Diamond Princess cruise ship in Japan where almost 200 were confined before most were evacuated to Darwin late last month.
Unauthorised people could be banned from leaving or entering these zones for up to three months, with the zone applying to “the whole or a part of a specified building”, according to the laws which are ready to be invoked.
The Commonwealth is also beefing up its economy-wide biosecurity powers, which have been in force for five years but are usually used in isolated border control instances, which could see places locked down.
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Such places could be sporting events, concerts or other places where large crowds gather or they might be specific locations such as shopping centres, schools or a particular building.
When the 2015 biosecurity laws were introduced – replacing a quarantine regime more than a century old – they were framed with just such a global pandemic as COVID-19 in mind.
Australia is fortunate to have a world class system for dealing with a pandemic like COVID-19 with Young and the Commonwealth Chief Medical Officer Brendan Murphy regarded as among the best officials operating anywhere in the world.
There’s no doubt the Commonwealth and Queensland governments are basing their responses on the best medical and scientific advice. As one adviser involved in trying to stay ahead of the crisis said this week, “We are planning for the worst and hoping for something far short of that”.
One interesting aspect of the global response has been the reluctance of the World Health Organisation to declare a pandemic. Australia has said we must act as if there is one and the Centre for Disease Control in the United States is operating on the same basis.
A pandemic is usually declared after authorities fail to contain an outbreak in specific regions or countries and it is expected governments would then switch from containment – isolating infected individuals – to mitigation which includes the kind of measures the Commonwealth is talking about from shutting schools to banning mass gatherings.
WHO officials are criticising what they see as the binary nature of government responses: they would prefer governments to be focused on containment and mitigation, rather than one or the other.
The best news in recent days is that leading scientific organisations such as Australia’s CSIRO, the MIGAL Research Institute in Israel and US laboratories such as Generex Biotechnology are advanced in finalising a vaccine and could move to human trials in the next week or so.
It’s clear the medical and scientific response is moving just as fast as the virus itself. For that we can all be very thankful.
