At the opening of this week’s New South Wales parliamentary committee hearing into the government’s response to the Covid-19 pandemic, Labor’s Penny Sharpe put a simple question to the state’s chief health officer.
On what date, she asked Dr Kerry Chant, did the state’s public health team “start preparing advice in relation to locking down parts of Sydney”?
It’s just one of the many questions that continue to bubble about how NSW, the state so often lauded as the “gold standard” of Covid management in Australia, mishandled an outbreak so badly.
NSW premier Gladys Berejiklian may be more focused on the path out of lockdown with promises of eased restrictions in September and October for the vaccinated, but her government continues to be dogged by questions about how they lost control of the outbreak.
Many of those questions spring from what happened in the days between the first recorded case of the Delta strain in Sydney’s eastern suburbs, on 16 June, and the decision to lock down seven local government areas 10 days later. In those critical early days of the outbreak, were there missed warning signs and could the government have done more to avoid what has become a daily horror show of growing case numbers, more deaths and new outbreaks across regional areas?
When the committee met on Tuesday, NSW marked its worst day of the pandemic, with 356 new cases. By the end of the week it had beaten that mark: the 390 new cases on Friday meant the state had recorded more than 1,700 cases in a five-day period.
The number of deaths linked to the outbreak also grew to 38, including two men aged in their 20s and 30s. The list of regional cities and towns subject to lockdowns also continued to grow, with particular concern around outbreaks in Dubbo and Walgett, where local health authorities said on Friday the “vast majority” of cases were Indigenous.
At the same time, premier Gladys Berejiklian’s suggestion that restrictions could begin to ease once vaccine rates reached just 50% or 60% prompted a furious response from other premiers who have clung to the notion of keeping the virus entirely out of the community.
The Western Australian premier, Mark McGowan, who has staked his political reputation on keeping his state entirely free of the virus, accused NSW of “risking the lives of their citizens [and] everyone else”. The state, he said, did not have “the backbone to do what is required”.
Whether McGowan’s insistence on a Covid-zero approach is helpful or even grounded in reality, the questions about whether NSW missed opportunities to quash the outbreak early on remain unanswered.
In the hearing this week, both Chant, the chief medical officer, and health minister Brad Hazzard explained that in the days following the outbreak they had discussed the feasibility of a localised lockdown in the city’s eastern suburbs, a tactic which had worked in controlling the Northern Beaches outbreak in December last year.
What they had not factored in, Chant said, was that a party in West Hoxton, in the city’s western suburbs, had turned into a seeding event which would mark the beginning of the end for NSW’s control of the outbreak: on 29 June, more than a week after cases linked to the party were discovered, NSW Health announced that about 10 more people than initially believed had been at the event.
“It was thought that cluster had actually been identified very early but there were issues around containment of that which were not appreciated,” Chant told the hearing.
“Obviously, with the benefit of hindsight, there are different decisions that can be made, but just be reassured that we were looking very closely at all elements of the response in terms of the recommendations to government about the controls at the time.”
And yet, the question of when health authorities first recommended the state enter lockdown remained unanswered. In response to Sharpe’s question, Chant first rattled off a list of things the government had done in the days after the first case was recorded.
Then this: “[the advice] would have been on the ... I would haver to check when they … it would have been around … the government acted quickly when we recommended those actions to the government on the days described.”
When Sharpe asked again, Hazzard, interrupted: “You have an expectation that some document appears,” he told Sharpe. “No, it doesn’t. It’s a moving feast.
“And Dr Chant is expressing the concerns raised by her public health team, it’s not just her, she has another 12 public health teams so there’s a constant discussion going on about what is happening as cases are rolling in.”
Quite what the state’s public health teams, and Chant, were telling the government in those 10 days remains unclear, but multiple sources have told Guardian Australia that the option of an earlier lockdown was at least canvassed among the public health officials who report to Chant.
While the committee eventually learned from Chant that the first “formal”, written advice to plunge Sydney into lockdown came on the same day the announcement was made – 25 June – both she and Hazzard were less forthcoming about what those daily discussions might have looked like.
“We were talking about all options right through … it is not a case of, ‘Well, today is the day we are going to talk about lockdown’,” Hazzard said on Tuesday.
All Chant would offer was that there “would have been a range of discussions with [Hazzard]”.
In the hearing, Hazzard was asked whether the state budget, released before the lockdown on 22 June, had been a factor in delaying the announcement, a belief that has been the subject of rampant speculation even among some Coalition MPs.
“In the middle of that 10-day period the state budget was handed down, it was considered to be a celebration that New South Wales had been exceptional in not locking down. Was the messaging around the budget any part of the thinking in not ordering a lockdown in that period?” committee chair David Shoebridge, a Greens MP, asked.
“No, never,” Hazzard responded. “I can give you a 2,000% guarantee on that. We do not think about those things.”
In any case, the pressure on NSW will continue to mount both internally and from outside the closed-up borders. Ahead of a national cabinet meeting on Friday the ACT chief minister, Andrew Barr, was asked about Berejiklian’s ambitions to begin easing elements of the restrictions once vaccination markers were hit at around 50% or 60%.
As the ACT grapples with its first cases of Covid-19 since July last year, Barr said that while he was comforted by Berejiklian’s reassurances that those relaxations would only be minor, he was troubled by media reports suggesting the state would take a more aggressive stance on living with the virus before widespread vaccination.
“It worries me that there is this speculation and suggestion in the media that that’s what’s going on, that’s got to come from somewhere – there’s someone backgrounding and it’s really, really concerning and alarming,” he said.
“With the benefit of hindsight I would hope it would have been a different approach but it is what it is now and it’s really what happens now that is the most important thing.”
