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House of Assembly - Fifty-Fourth Parliament, Second Session (54-2)
2020-03-25 Daily Xml
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Coronavirus

Mr MALINAUSKAS (Croydon—Leader of the Opposition) (14:15): My question is to the Premier. Have any further cases been identified at South Australian schools beyond the two already accounted for at Unley High School?

The Hon. S.S. MARSHALL (Dunstan—Premier) (14:15): I don't have that specific information, but I am sure we can come back to you. The total number as per the update yesterday was that we had 170 people who had become infected in South Australia. They have been identified.

For the reasons that I outlined earlier, I believe that we have a very accurate picture of the number of infections in South Australia compared to just about any other jurisdiction in the world. Everybody reports the number of infections, but probably very few places in the world can have the confidence in their data like we have in South Australia for the reasons that I outlined before. I think we are in a good position.

To date, we have no deaths in South Australia and, in fact, today was the first day in which we had patients admitted to an ICU. What the statistics show you is about eight out of every 10 people that contract this virus will have very minor symptoms and will probably get over this disease in a very rapid time, about 20 per cent of people will require higher-level medical support or hospitalisation and about 7 per cent of the total population will require intensive care.

That is one of the reasons we want to obviously push down the peak but also delay it as much as possible: so that we can increase our capacity—our ICU capacity, our critical care capacity, our ventilator capacity, our nursing capacity, our ECMO capacity and all the things that the health professionals have informed us for months now that we will need to have in place at the time of the peak.

One of the other reasons we want to delay that peak is so we can learn from the other jurisdictions. If we can get further behind at the front internationally and further behind the front in Australia, we can learn from how those jurisdictions handle the peak of this disease. What we are also finding now is there is more and more research being done and we are getting closer to a vaccine, but we are also already getting a lot of information about better treatments for people who are living with COVID-19 so that they are not spending as much time in ICU, they are getting through and there is a better recovery rate.

When we look at the death rate in Italy, up over 7 per cent, we've got to do everything we can to make sure that we are absolutely at the bottom end of the scale in terms of unnecessary deaths in Australia. That is all a matter of getting demand for this high-level health care and supply in balance and that is what our whole process is about.

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