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House of Assembly - Fifty-Fourth Parliament, Second Session (54-2)
2020-04-07 Daily Xml
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Coronavirus

Mr PICTON (Kaurna) (14:42): My question is to the Premier. Will the Premier release the government's own state modelling on COVID-19 as the Premier confirmed the government is using on a radio interview yesterday morning?

The Hon. S.S. MARSHALL (Dunstan—Premier) (14:42): As I also made clear in my public statements, this is a model that is changing over time. It is one that we need to see further develop. We made it very clear today following the national cabinet, when we released the modelling that we have relied on to date in the first phase of the pandemic, that this is a model that is changing over time. The modelling that was released today looked at three different scenarios: unmitigated, a scenario that had a combination of isolation and quarantine and one that had isolation, quarantine and social distancing.

It is really only in that third case scenario that we are going to be in a position essentially to reduce the peak and push it out into the future far enough. That's the modelling that has been released from the national cabinet today. The Prime Minister has made it clear, along with Professor Brendan Murphy, that there will be further models developed in the next couple of weeks. That will be released to the public. It will have more comprehensive Australian actual data rather than just relying on what has happened in other jurisdictions around the world.

We made it clear at that meeting that we need to continue to work on a model that doesn't just look at an aggregated Australian scenario but a model that actually breaks it down into jurisdictions and subjurisdictions. The example the Prime Minister used, which I thought was very apt, was that there's no point looking at aggregate rainfall in Australia. Different districts are very interested in what the rainfall in their own area is, and that is precisely what we are dealing with here in Australia.

The most crucial issue that is still keeping us concerned is the issue of community transmission. To date, as of this morning there were 540 cases of community transmission in Australia. Thankfully, we have just three of those in South Australia. This isn't the case in other jurisdictions, so we are very mindful of the pressures that are on those jurisdictions when they don't know where that next infection is going to come from. That is why it is just so crucial that we continue to maintain the very strong restrictions that we have in South Australia.

If we had released a model several weeks ago, it would look very different from what it does today. To be clear, two weeks ago we were looking at 25 per cent increases in new infections on a daily basis; now we are looking at around 2 per cent. In fact, South Australia is doing extraordinarily well. If you take out some of those clusters that have skewed our results, we have been doing particularly well. I think that we now have 120 of our approximately 400 infections in South Australia coming from cruise ships. That has very much skewed our result, as has the Barossa cluster and the airport cluster.

Even when you take that into account, we have to be extraordinarily focused on doing everything we can to reduce that peak, push it out into the future and simultaneously increase our ability to respond with critical care. When I am talking about critical care, in particular, I am talking about beds at different various levels of treating people in South Australia and the issue of ventilators, ECMO capability and also nursing capability.

So there are lots and lots of things that we need to do and we've also got to be mindful of the PPE situation. For all of those reasons, our strategy is very clear: we want to buy ourselves some time to get better prepared so that when that peak hits we are in a much better position to make sure that anybody needing critical care in South Australia receives it.

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