A Sydney epidemiologist has said it is “laughable” for the New South Wales health minister to suggest fans should be able to attend the SCG cricket Test to help their mental health while authorities are working to contain a Covid cluster in the city’s west.
Public health experts have warned the coronavirus outbreak linked to Sydney’s western suburbs will be challenging to contain because a lack of state-wide public health restrictions over the Christmas and New Year holiday period meant people could still gather in households.
Over Christmas, people living outside of the northern beaches peninsula could gather in houses in groups of 10 plus any children. Indoor gatherings for New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day were restricted to five visitors but people could still go to restaurants. Masks were not mandatory at the time.
Liquor store BWS Berala was first listed by health authorities as a venue of concern on 31 December. At the time, people who attended the store were considered casual contacts of a positive case.
But by Sunday 3 January, NSW Health updated its advice to state that anyone who attended the BWS store between Tuesday 22 December and Thursday 31 December was considered a close contact and must get tested and self-isolate for 14 days. There are now 16 cases in the Berala cluster.
An honorary senior research fellow with the George Institute for Global Health in Sydney, Prof Alexandra Martiniuk, said the Berala cluster was a serious challenge for health authorities “because of the large numbers of people who visit that particular BWS store – including 1,000 people on Christmas Eve – and the time period over Christmas and the New Year when many different households gather”.
To help prevent the virus from spreading beyond the western suburbs, the health minister, Brad Hazzard, said on Wednesday that people living in proscribed suburbs would be banned from attending the Sydney cricket Test which will have up to 10,000 spectators daily from Thursday.
“It wouldn’t be productive” to stop all fans from attending or to scrap the Test altogether, Hazzard told reporters. “You have to think about people’s mental health.”
But Martiniuk said “the mental health reason to hold the Test is a very poor one”.
“Ten thousand privileged people attending a cricket match to help mental health is laughable to me,” she said. “Concern about catching Covid-19 was actually listed as one of the main mental health issues in the Australian Bureau of Statistic’s Household Impacts of Covid-19 Survey. Attending, or watching 10,000 people attend a cricket match, will not alleviate the feelings of concern about Covid-19.”
Martiniuk argued that geographically “Berala does not make it easy to do local lockdown as was enabled by the northern beaches geography”.
“But also the cluster is currently not as large as the Avalon cluster so a lockdown would be too harsh for the current situation,” she said. “The Berala BWS appears to have been a highly infectious situation given some positive cases have arisen after a brief time in the store and this also makes it a greater challenge.”
Regional NSW including Orange is now on high alert after a teenager connected to the Berala cluster went on a 900km trip throughout the state while unknowingly infectious.
Berala is home to just over 9,000 people and more than 2,000 of them have been contacted by health authorities and told to isolate. According to the 2018 Census, 80% of households speak a language other than English, most commonly Mandarin but also Cantonese, Arabic, Vietnamese and Korean.
Genomic sequencing results for the Berala cluster are the same as for a patient transport worker who unknowingly visited the BWS store on 20 December while infectious. The patient transport worker was infected by a colleague, who was infected by returned international travellers in hotel quarantine.
NSW Health has said the cluster highlighted that Covid “can be transmitted by asymptomatic or pre-symptomatic people during very short exposure windows”.
Martiniuk said health authorities must ensure language translation of health messages and engage community leaders across cultural groups to assist. The NSW health minister, Brad Hazzard, said on Wednesday that “we called for the [multicultural] community leaders to actually make sure their communities were hearing messages through them as well”.
Prof Mary-Louise McLaws, a Sydney epidemiologist with expertise in infectious diseases control, said NSW health authorities should have acted more swiftly prior to Christmas to prevent virus spread.
“The restrictions in place around that time weren’t based on a tried and true outbreak management response,” she said. “Allowing people to gather in households is not prevention appropriate. I can’t see any outbreak management approach to allowing people to gather in those numbers other than trying to give some people some joy, and having some friends and family around, but I don’t see how that was based on modelling. In suburbs like Berala where people have close cultural and family connections, it’s easy to have lots of houses gathering in groups of 10.”
McLaws said Berala would now prove a challenge for health authorities to contain given the close proximity of the train station to shops and restaurants in the suburb. “It allows for very easy transportation of anyone infected outside of that area,” she said.
“I despair at the slowness of authorities learning about this virus. You know, if we needed to learn something about how you go in fast, and you go in hard, Victoria taught us a lot. But we don’t seem to be learning from Victoria and that’s very disappointing.”
