As case numbers soar and the army hits the streets tomorrow to keep people indoors, the NSW crisis shows no signs of ending. Rhianna Mitchell investigates why the situation is so dire and what the State’s leader can do to end the nightmare
Across Sydney, about 550 contact tracers are working around the clock to identify and notify those people who have potentially been exposed to COVID-19.
At one point held up as the “gold standard” of pandemic management, those performing this vital task are now struggling under the day-to-day strain.
With Sydney’s lockdown so far failing to curb the spread of deadly Delta, and daily case numbers hitting a record 239 this week, the contract tracing system appears to have reached breaking point.
The stubbornly high daily number of people in the community while infectious, a number which needs to get to near zero before restrictions can ease, has experts worried it is now impossible to get in front of the virus.
With frustrated Sydney residents facing many more weeks in lockdown, and tensions high with a second anti-lockdown protest threatened, Premier Gladys Berejiklian — dubbed last year as “the woman who saved Australia” — is now under fire for her handling of the crisis.
The State reported 210 new locally acquired cases yesterday and a 14th death, a man in his 60s who died at home. NSW Health Minister Brad Hazzard described a “terrible situation” where families, particularly in the South West, are not coming forward when one of them falls ill.
The potential for more protest prompted a huge police operation, which excluded taxis and Ubers from the CBD yesterday, saw checkpoints on every major road into the city — and seemingly persuaded the hordes to stay home.
But that ring of steel around the city was in stark contrast to just five weeks ago, when on NSW State Budget night Treasurer Dominic Perrottet proudly announced, “NSW is open for business.”
“Keeping our economy open has made NSW the confidence capital of Australia,” he said. “Confidence is back because we kept calm and carried on.”
As he spoke in Parliament, the highly contagious Delta variant was already spreading its tentacles through the city.
A limousine driver from Bondi, who had transported international flight crews, had tested positive on June 16 and by Budget night the number of cases had reached 21.
Now, Sydney is in the grip of a major outbreak which has reached almost 3000 cases and is estimated to be costing the economy $220 million a day.
This week was the worst yet for residents desperate for positive signs five weeks after greater Sydney went into lockdown. Thursday’s record 239 cases prompted Ms Berejiklian to tighten restrictions across eight local government areas, in the West and South West, hardest hit by the outbreak. In those areas, masks are now mandatory outdoors and residents are restricted to a 5km radius area.
Health experts say the measures should have been introduced earlier, and want them applied across greater Sydney.
“The piecemeal approach being taken by the NSW Government is not working and there needs to be an urgent tightening of restrictions, with clear, consistent messaging,” AMA NSW president Danielle McMullen said.
“This means we need to look at more restrictions on retail activities that remain open, like garden centres and hardware stores, along with nonessential industries.”
As the pressure ramped up this week, the NSW Government also enlisted about 300 Australian Defence Force personnel to join police in enforcing lockdown measures across the eight council areas.
Announcing the new restrictions the NSW Premier predicted daily case numbers would “bounce around,” and issued a grim warning: “Based on those numbers we can only assume that things are likely to get worse before they get better, given the quantity of people infectious in the community.”
But Ms Berejiklian rejected suggestions she had failed by imposing restrictions too late and too gradually, insisting there was “no perfect way” to respond to an outbreak of Delta.
Her way, described by WA Premier Mark McGowan as arrogant and inadequate, has been met with growing anger. And during an intense exchange during Thursday’s press conference, Sky News journalist Andrew Clennell demanded she admit her strategy was not working.
He asked: “With these numbers today, will you admit that your strategy has failed, that you have failed?
“'Will you admit . . . this death of 1000 cuts, a little bit of restrictions every day, is not working and you have to come down hard?”
The next day, the Sydney Morning Herald declared it had lost faith in Ms Berejiklian’s “policy based on half measures” and used an editorial to back a blanket Sydneywide lockdown.
“It is now clear NSW should have gone much harder and much faster and thrown everything at the Bondi cluster from day one,” the newspaper said.
A GRIM OUTLOOK
Sydney-based data journalist Juliette O’Brien has been crunching the numbers on COVID-19 since the pandemic started, on a crowdfunded website she launched to bring together and display all the numbers relating to outbreaks, restrictions, testing and hospitalisations.
Ms O’Brien said the biggest concern amid the Sydney outbreak data was that, despite ever-increasing restrictions, the number of infectious people in the community each day remained high.
About 55 per cent of the 588 cases reported between Wednesday and Friday were infectious while in the community. That continued yesterday with at least 32, and possibly as many as 152 of the confirmed cases active in the community.
“We just don’t get enough information about why this number continues to grow,” Ms O’Brien said. “Are they asymptomatic essential workers?
“Are they symptomatic people going to the doctor or chemist, or are they people just breaking the rules and going to parties?
“We have no idea, but as a community, if we want to drive that number down, we have to understand it.”
Ms O’Brien said when it came to contact tracing, “all the data points are going in the wrong direction”.
“They all indicate not only is the virus ahead of the contact tracers, but it is gaining ground. We have more cases under investigation each day, and more in the community while infectious,” she said.
Another telling statistic was the percentage of COVID-19 cases who were notified within one day of a positive test. This fell to 84 per cent this week, from 90 per cent last week.
“We have been in lockdown for five weeks and right now, we are at a worse point than we were a fortnight ago,” Ms O’Brien said.
This fact had left many Sydneysiders, who were initially supportive of their Premier’s approach to the outbreak, angry.
Ms O’Brien said NSW had previously managed other outbreaks, including one which started at the Crossroads Hotel, south-west of Sydney, in June last year, and a second at Avalon, on the northern beaches, which peaked at 151 cases in January.
The Avalon outbreak was contained without city-wide lockdowns. Instead, impacted suburbs were given stay-athome orders and limits on indoor and outdoor gatherings were introduced.
It was this approach that prompted Prime Minister Scott Morrison to praise the State’s handling of the pandemic.
“We were in such a unique position before, where we wouldn’t go into lockdown and they seemed to be able to control it,” Ms O’Brien said.
“People appreciated not being locked down, and the fact our contract tracers seemed able to handle it.
“Delta is obviously a totally different ball game and I guess now there are questions of, ‘If Delta is this much worse, why didn’t you realise beforehand?’
“Why did you think you could keep using the same tools against a very different virus? People are frustrated there wasn’t the foresight and there is now very little argument against short, sharp shutdowns when you compare to Victoria.”
NO MASKING TOUGH RULES THE REMEDY
The updated Sydney restrictions came days after a world-first study released by Melbourne’s Burnet Institute found mandating masks during Melbourne’s second wave in July last year was the “single most important control measure and turned the epidemic around.”
Co-lead author Dr Nick Scott said the Victorian Government’s mandatory mask rule, implemented on July 22 last year during Stage 3 restrictions, turned an exponential increase in community transmission into an exponential decrease, almost overnight.
Health authorities will be watching closely in the coming days to see if the new rules in Sydney make a difference. NSW Health’s central close contact tracing team started with just four people on March 12 last year, and has grown from 275 at the start of June to 350. Another 200 contact tracers work across the State, and NSW Health said more than 400 staff assisted in a surge capacity.
WA, the ACT and Tasmania have pledged 30 staff members to assist in the massive challenge.
Professor Mike Toole from the Burnet Institute believes the system reached breaking point this week, when a shopping mall in Sydney’s south west was listed as a “key venue of concern” across an 11-day period.
NSW Health revealed “many people” had been exposed at the “very popular” Campsie Central Shopping Centre between July 14 and 24 after a number of people with COVID-19 visited the centre.
“At the beginning of that 11-day period, all the shops were open,” Professor Toole explained. “An infected person attended more than a week ago, and it’s taken (contact tracers) that long to identify it (as a venue of concern.)
“If you were conservative and said 1000 people went through every day, that’s 11,000 people those 550 contact tracers have to call.”
Professor Toole said that didn’t include the secondary contacts, who would amount to another 55,000 people, and the overload was such that he doubted it was logistically possible to contact those people.
“The big problem at the moment is there are so many mystery cases, so they have to do contact tracing in two directions, and that doubles the workload.”
Professor Toole said mandatory masks outdoors should have been implemented far earlier, and also that the rule should have been applied Sydney-wide rather than in specific LGAs.
“It is the least-intrusive, cheapest method, but there seems to be resistance to it in Sydney,” he said.
Restricting all residents to a 5km, instead of 10km, radius would also reduce the workload of the contact tracers, Professor Toole said.
BURNING QUESTION
As the crisis in Sydney worsened, National Cabinet met on Friday to discuss the vaccination rollout and the burning question: What percentage of the population needs to be vaccinated before lockdowns are a thing of the past?
The answer was 70 per cent, with a caveat. The PM said reaching this target, phase B in Australia’s pathway out of the pandemic, would make lockdowns far less likely, but still possible.
“(Lockdowns) are not something that you would normally expect because of the much higher level of vaccination and protection that exists within the country,” he said.
This target will feel some way off for the five million people in Sydney who are in lockdown, with Australia’s vaccination rate sitting at 14.5 per cent.
No timeline was given for the vaccination targets but Mr Morrison hoped phase B could be reached by the end of the year.
Professor Toole said his most optimistic prediction for when Sydney might emerge from lockdown was November. “I can’t see how they could do it in the next four weeks.” He also warned about a potential disaster over the Christmas holiday period as people travelled and visited friends and family.
AMA President Dr Omar Khorshid said the next few days would be crucial.
“Unless daily infection numbers come down over the next few days, NSW is in real danger of having to live with the COVID-19 Delta strain for the foreseeable future,” Dr Khorshid said.
“That means ongoing lockdowns and restrictions, not to mention a huge cost to the health and wellbeing of the community and the economy of the whole nation.
“The alternative is months of lockdown or having to face the enormous human toll inflicted by this terrible virus in other parts of the world.”
Originally Posted by Griffin
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