Coronavirus

Mr CREGAN (Kavel) (14:17): My question is to the Premier. Can the Premier update the house on measures the state government is taking to minimise the impact of coronavirus in South Australia?

The Hon. S.S. MARSHALL (Dunstan—Premier) (14:17): I thank the member for Kavel for his excellent question. Much work has been done since the coronavirus first came to light back on 21 January. In fact, I think we should all feel very proud of how quickly this state, and in particular our public health officials in this state, have worked to put a very strong plan in place to tackle the coronavirus.

The principal first stage of our response has been, if you like, to reduce the peak and push it out into the future as much as possible. A lot of good work has been done in this area. I know some of the restrictions that have been put in place have been very hard, and particularly hard on businesses and families and employees right across this state.

However, as everybody can now see, we do not have the exponential growth that is hitting much of the rest of the world at the moment, and that is something that we can be very grateful for, because the longer we slow down the progress of this disease the more we can do to put the critical care resources that we need in place to deal with the peak when it eventually comes to South Australia.

We are buying time, if you like, to prepare everything we possibly can, and in South Australia we have wasted no time in massively increasing the capacity of our state to deal with that peak when it hits. Some of you would already be aware of the work that we have done essentially taking over the ECH College Grove facility with 58 beds, the Wakefield Hospital with 130 beds, which had been closed and which is soon to be completely and utterly reactivated, and another 90 beds down at the Repat hospital where we have opened four wards, which were previously completely decommissioned and ready for the wrecking ball. Now they have been stood up again, and work is going on around the clock to make sure they're ready for when that peak hits. Of course, there are many other measures in that regard.

I am particularly pleased that we have pushed ahead with an additional up to 300 staff to do the contact tracing in South Australia. This is absolutely crucial so that when we do have somebody identified with a positive test result for COVID-19 the health professionals can sit down, understand when that person was infectious, do all the contact tracing for the people they were likely to have come into contact with and then immediately put them into a quarantine position. This is absolutely critical, and has proved to be life-saving in terms of slowing down the spread of the disease here in South Australia.

In recent weeks, we have also announced that we will be bringing forward the significant expansion of the Flinders Medical Centre emergency department. This is a 50 per cent increase in the capacity of South Australia's busiest ED, and work will start on that this very month. We are also massively upskilling our healthcare workers in South Australia with 97 new paramedic recruits, and a thousand extra nurses have signed up to be on stand-by should we need them as part of the surge capacity that might be envisaged.

Of course, we have also signed a historic deal with the private hospitals in South Australia. This will provide us with access to an additional 1,700 beds in South Australia, and their ICU capacity represented about 40 per cent of what we had in South Australia at the time this broke out. Of course, we have naturally increased our own ICU capability and capacity in that time.

I would like to conclude by conveying very grateful thanks to the people of South Australia for their observance to date of the restrictions that have been put in place. These have, quite literally, been life-saving, but now is not the time to be complacent. I know the numbers are tracking down in South Australia, and that is great, but now is not a time for us to be taking our foot off the brake.