Tracing of cases ‘futile’

OMICRON forced the Tasmanian government to scale down and then abandon its contact tracing efforts, which became “impractical” because of the sheer scale of the outbreak.

The admissions were made during Friday’s inquiry into the Tasmanian government’s response to the Covid-19 pandemic.

Earlier during the pandemic the government had tried to list specific businesses and sites as Covid hot spots, but director of Public Health Mark Veitch said that quickly became unworkable as cases spread.

Dr Veitch said the whole of Tasmania quickly became an at-risk site, rendering their efforts “futile” when it came to tracking individual hot spots.

“Most of the planning we did was built around the prospects of a strain that

had more or less the same transmission dynamics of the Delta strain,” he said.

“As the numbers mounted very quickly with Omicron it became quite clear that to ask people where they’d been when they’d potentially been infectious – it quickly turned out to be Tasmania as a whole.

“It would be misleading to the public to be overly specific when we needed a really general cautionary approach.”

The use of the Check-in

Tas app was strictly enforced in the beginning, but gradually wound down and stopped altogether in most venues.

Labor MP Josh Willie asked when the government stopped using the data from the Check-in Tas app, given how long people were asked to keep using the app.

“From my memory we were still checking into a lot of business and I think people thought the government wasn’t using the data towards the end,” Mr Willie said.

Premier Jeremy Rockliff said the app was part of the government’s initial “aggressive containment strategy”, which was eventually dropped in all settings from May 2.

“The Check-in Tas app was a key resource for pursuing the elimination/containment strategy for Covid-19,” he said.

Dr Veitch said the check-in app’s initial usefulness began to wear thin as the caseloads became too overwhelming to keep track of.

In the later stages, Dr Veitch said the check-in rules had been kept only in highrisk settings and events just as a precautionary measure.

“I think it’s fair to say it was a just-in-case mechanism in case we needed to deal with a large outbreak in those settings. Its use, as the Premier just mentioned, as an aggressive containment strategy … it became futile to achieve that end when Omicron became very widespread,” he said.