Business and tourism celebrate as Brisbane’s hotspot pain lifts

QUEENSLAND businesses say they are overjoyed that Brisbane’s COVID pain appears over nine days after the lockdown was announced, and hope the fast response provides some confidence for Easter holiday-makers.

Greater Brisbane’s status as a COVID-19 hotspot was on Sunday revoked as Victoria and South Australia opened up to the region following concern that the UK strain linked to the Hotel Grand Chancellor could spread nationally.

The move came as Brisbane again reported no new cases of community transmission, but two cases in hotel quarantine.

Federal Health Minister Greg Hunt praised the state government, medical workers, pathologists and the Queensland community for their extraordinary response, which meant the hotspot designation could be lifted.

“The Prime Minister and the Australian government were very, very clear in our unequivocal support for the measures which were taken out of an abundance of precaution,” he said. “What this shows is we’re containing the virus.

“There are no hotspot definitions.”

Mr Hunt said Australia would still be affected as the remaining world battles soaring virus numbers: “We‘re not out of the woods because the world isn’t out of the woods.

“And our challenges remain always, while there is a disease that is abroad in the rest of the world, but Australians are doing incredibly well.”

Queensland business groups said this latest response had been the best in terms of localised response and that authorities had done a better job of communicating information to the public around the reasons for it this time around.

Queensland Tourism Industry Council chief executive Daniel Gschwind said the industry hoped business confidence would grow as authorities became “more savvy” in locally targeting their responses to clusters.

“The announcement 10 days ago now was a shock to us all and a massive inconvenience but it was the lesser of two bad scenarios for sure,” he said.

“We avoided wholesale border closures from many states and it certainly is a far more cost-effective way to deal with an outbreak ...”

Queensland still requires people visiting or returning from Greater Sydney to quarantine for 14 days following the northern beaches cluster outbreak which occurred just before Christmas.