COVID: Northern Territory boosts quarantine capacity as Australia’s vaccine rollout is lagging

The plan to vaccinate 80,000 Australians per week is behind schedule, as the Northern Territory’s return traveller quarantine facility will be boosted. Prime Minister Scott Morrison said in January he “anticipated optimistically” 80,000 Australians would be vaccinated every week at the beginning of the rollout, before the effort was “scaled up”. But almost two weeks after the first vaccine was administered, only 71,867 Australians have been immunised, including 20,814 residents across 241 aged care facilities. Health Minister Greg Hunt insisted mid-February the government remained “on track … for all the milestones we’ve set”, including a target to reach four million vaccinations by early April. Labor acting health spokesman Chris Bowen said the government faced an uphill battle to meet that threshold. “Australia has a long, long way to go in the vaccine rollout and it will only become longer if supply of the vaccines doesn’t arrive,” he said. Meantime, Northern Territory’s Howard Springs COVID quarantine facility is set to boost its capacity, meaning it can take 15 per cent of those returning to Australia on international repatriation flights. Mr Morrison said the facility would be expanded to accept 2,000 returning Australians per fortnight – that’s up from 850. previously. The facility began taking in repatriated Australians in October. Mr Morrison said the federal government had entered into an agreement with the NT to expand the facility “over the next few months”. “That is an important addition to the capacity of those quarantine facilities, to receive those return chartered flights that Australia has been putting in place for many, many months,” Mr Morrison said. In better news, the Prime Minister confirmed that locally-made vaccine doses are on-track to begin being given from March 22, with Australians set to receive the doses in just over two weeks. Health Secretary Professor Brendan Murphy said despite being a “once-in-a-generation logistic challenge,” the vaccine rollout is “going well”. “We started carefully and progressively across Australia, as we can do because we are in such a good place … We don’t have a burning platform. We have time to do this properly and carefully,” Mr Murphy said. Mr Murphy also said the government is “ramping up” rollout efforts after its first two weeks, promising to “get this community vaccinated as soon as we can.” “The really, really exciting thing is that in the week beginning 22 March we will start to release the onshore supply of AstraZeneca vaccine. “A million doses-plus a week, which gives us the capacity to really ramp up and broadly vaccinate our population as quickly as possible,” Mr Murphy said. It comes as NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian has drawn a line in the sand in the fight against COVID-19, calling for an end to the daily updates on the number of locally acquired cases. Ms Berejiklian’s bold stance comes before the premiers meet with Scott Morrison at national Cabinet and as the Pfizer vaccine rollout approaches its third week. Health officials in NSW are preparing to begin administering the AstraZeneca vaccine in NSW from March 10. South Australia is the first state where AstraZeneca jabs began on Friday. NSW also recorded its 46th consecutive day with no locally acquired cases of the virus on Thursday. It is now that the nation needs to change its attitude towards the virus, according to Ms Berejiklian. “I’m confident the vast majority of the population will get vaccinated,” Ms Berejiklian told 2GB on Friday. “The vast majority of us won’t go into hospital and to me a measure of success of living with COVID-19 is preventing serious illness and preventing death. “What is a good measure of success is keeping people alive and keeping them out of hospital and that should be what we’re measuring.” Ms Berejiklian was steadfast in declaring that trying to achieve long stretches without locally acquired cases of COVID-19 was redundant. “Zero community transmissions are easy to achieve when we’ve got no international travel,” she said. “We need to change our measure or we will be left behind as a nation if we don’t think about travelling internationally.” Ms Berejiklian said once the vaccine rollout was completed around October, the approach to COVID-19 should be similar to how medical experts deal with the flu. “We know that we have hundreds of deaths every year from the flu,” she said. “We don’t measure the amount of people who get the flu, but we do measure the number of people who get very sick and unfortunately die. “Without sounding in any way unsympathetic or not valuing human life, that’s the opposite of what I’m trying to do, I think we need to think about how do we measure our success in dealing with COVID.” QLD FINDS COVID FRAGMENTS IN WASTEWATER The Queensland government said on Friday it had detected positive fragments of COVID-19 at multiple wastewater catchments. The virus was detected at wastewater treatment plants at Luggage Point, which serves the Brisbane metropolitan north and some inner-city suburbs on the southside, Marlin Coast in Cairns and Kawana on the Sunshine Coast. Queensland’s chief health officer, Dr Jeannette Young, warned that the positive fragments indicated there could still be cases at large. She urged people with symptoms to get tested: “It is very important people with symptoms come forward right away and get tested – we can’t be complacent, we’re still in this pandemic. It is critical we detect any cases that we may not be aware of as quickly as possible through our testing system, to contain any potential spread.” Dr Young said she was concerned by the new highly-transmissible variants emerging overseas and that they might take hold in Queensland. ASTRAZENECA BOSS SAYS VACCINE 100% EFFECTIVE AstraZeneca CEO Pascal Soriot has backed his company’s vaccine as 100 per cent effective against severe COVID-19 disease as the first doses were rolled out in Australia on Friday to health staff in South Australia, with Western Australia and other states to follow next week. Mr Soriot said the vaccine is as effective as Pfizer’s, based on current field data, and called on authorities to suppress fake news and conspiracy theories from anti-vaxxers. “I don’t mean just the political leadership, I’m talking about the scientific leadership, the TGA in this country, the chief medical officers, the people in charge of vaccination guidelines and recommendations; those people need to speak up and educate and reassure, because people listen to scientists,” he told The Australian. “The goal here is to protect as many people as possible to save lives, but also to start the economy. We cannot do this if people do not get vaccinated.” Mr Soriot is a French-Australian dual-national, based in Sydney. He admonished high profile sceptics who are setting back progress with their opinions. “The people who are public figures, who are known, they should remember their word counts and they should really think about what they say” Mr Soriot said. Australian businessman Clive Palmer’s claim that the AstraZeneca and Pfizer vaccines had been rushed through emergency approval by the government was disputed by Mr Soriot. “That was not correct. It is a full approval,” he said, noting that the vaccines received approval elsewhere last year. JAB SENDS NURSE INTO ANAPHYLACTIC SHOCK A nurse suffered an anaphylactic reaction shortly after receiving the Pfizer vaccine at Gold Coast University Hospital. Queensland Health confirmed the person, who has a history of anaphylaxis, was given the appropriate medical care and recovered quickly. “Anaphylaxis has been identified as a possible side effect from any vaccination. Staff are well prepared for this and stringent processes are in place to manage such reactions,” Queensland Health told the Courier Mail. “After receiving the vaccine, recipients are observed for 15 minutes or 30 minutes if they have identified a history of anaphylaxis in the screening process. “The response was prompt and effective and the patient received the appropriate treatment and has since recovered.” Seven new cases of the COVID-19 were recorded among people in hotel quarantine in Queensland today, taking the number of active infections in the state to 21. STATES NEED TO RAMP UP JABS: FEDS With the goal of having Australians vaccinated by October, the states will need to dramatically boost their COVID jab rollout efforts, the Morrison government has warned. Health Minister Greg Hunt said the states will “continue to ramp up” their vaccination programs, in order to meet the goal of having every Australian who wants the jab receiving it by October. “We’re really confident that all of the states will continue to ramp up, I understand that there have been different paces … but all of them have good plans,” Mr Hunt said, according to the ABC. “There will every week be challenges that will need to be overcome, but that’s been the story of the last year.” Previously, Mr Hunt had said 80,000 doses would be circulated in the first week, with a “cautious and conservative” estimate that 60,000 would be administered. However, ABC reported that only 63,140 doses were distributed, and 33,702 injected. On average, about 10,000 doses of the COVID-19 jab are given in Australia daily – well behind target.