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House of Assembly - Fifty-Fourth Parliament, Second Session (54-2)
2020-03-24 Daily Xml
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Coronavirus

Dr CLOSE (Port Adelaide—Deputy Leader of the Opposition) (14:42): My question is to the Premier. Is the Premier planning on cancelling school holidays, given his view that allowing children out into the public would be a public health catastrophe?

The Hon. S.S. MARSHALL (Dunstan—Premier) (14:42): I thank the deputy leader for her question. As I have stated really right from day one here, we will be following the advice of the AHPPC, the Australian Health Protection Principal Committee. It is chaired by Dr Brendan Murphy. All the chief public health officers from all of the other jurisdictions are on that. They are receiving expert input from the Communicable Disease Network Australia.

I feel very, very assured that the advice that we are receiving is the highest level. As we receive that advice, we will be implementing that advice here in South Australia, and we have not received any advice that we should be cancelling school holidays. In fact, as I updated the house earlier today, it was made very clear only on Sunday night that schools should remain open and children should be going to school. The minister has outlined his case with these exceptions, but that is the very clear advice of the AHPPC.

I fully appreciate that there are many people who have got differing opinions on this, but we are trying to make decisions in a very stressful and time constrained situation. I think the best thing that we can do to protect the health of the people of South Australia is to listen to the expert epidemiologists, public health officials—those people who are qualified to provide this advice. I give this following caveat, because it is important to give this caveat: this advice does change over time. If we go back to looking at, for example, the advice that we received from the AHPPC only two weeks ago regarding mass gatherings, it was for a maximum limit of 500 people. Then there was the decision to differentiate between outside and inside, static and non-static, and other advice changes as we progress through the virus spreading around Australia and as we move to having higher levels of community transmission.

One of the things that we are very fortunate with here in South Australia is that we do not have the same levels of community transmission as they have in other states. In fact, as of today, I don't think we have any example of community transmission. Let me just explain what that is. There has been transmission from one person to another, but there is no example yet in South Australia where we can't trace back the origin of the infection to somebody who has been overseas and come back and passed it to somebody they were in close contact with or who has been interstate and come back and passed it to somebody else they were with. In one case, it was at one of our schools between a teacher and a student.

All of those have been traced. The contact tracing, which is done by the Communicable Disease Control Branch within SA Health, has been excellent. This is what gives us a lot of confidence that we do not have that community transmission at the moment. We also have a very high number of coronavirus tests that have been administered in South Australia; in fact, there were 17,800 as of this morning, which gives us one of the highest rates per capita of testing anywhere in the world—not just anywhere in Australia or anywhere in the region but anywhere in the world.

A lot of those tests are applied not just to people within the narrow scope that is allowed for people to come and get them, but we are administering them as well to a cohort who are in the general public. That gives us the confidence level that we don't have that community transmission in South Australia. Ultimately, this will come. This is a global pandemic. We can't avoid it coming to South Australia, but what we can do by working together is reduce the peak and push that peak into the future so that we can get as prepared as we possibly can.

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