‘It’s a ghost town’: Covid has left NSW’s second-largest city reeling
On the main street of Newcastle, the Happy Wombat pub has become an oasis in the desert.
“I feel like I’m running the last waterhole, and everyone’s coming here to drink the muddy water,” publican Luke Tilse tells Guardian Australia.
“Not that I’m saying my customers are animals.”
Located on Hunter Street, the city’s main drag, it’s one of the only hotels that has not closed its doors during what was, pre-pandemic, the busiest trading week of the year.
“It’s like the apocalypse out there,” Tilse says. “Everyone is staying away, either out of fear of getting Covid or having to isolate over Christmas, or because they have it. It’s a ghost town.”
Newcastle, the second-largest city in New South Wales, is the centre of the largest Covid-19 outbreak in Australia.
On Wednesday local health authorities said there were 5,728 total active cases in the Hunter region, of which Newcastle is the capital. The vast majority have come in the past seven days, a surge prompted by an outbreak of the Omicron variant at a popular nightclub, Argyle House, known locally as Fanny’s.
The 1970s-themed prom night event at the club led to more than 200 people catching the virus, a superspreader event local health official Dr David Durrheim said may be one of the largest recorded during the pandemic.
That outbreak led to a series of similar clusters at nightclubs throughout the city. By 16 December the NSW health department issued advice urging the city’s residents to “seriously consider deferring any social events in Newcastle until after Christmas in order to help keep family Christmas gatherings safe, and to help protect their loved ones, the vulnerable and our essential workers”.
The outbreak has left the city reeling. Events such as the Lunar Electric
music festival were cancelled following an order by the NSW health minister, while on Wednesday the local ALeague franchise, the Newcastle Jets, announced their Boxing Day match would be played behind closed doors, the first major sporting event to do so since the Omicron outbreak.
Because the largest exposure sites have been nightclubs, many of those infected in Newcastle are younger, leading to crippling staff shortages which have forced many of the city’s hotels and restaurants to close.
Tilse says that three of his staff members were at the Argyle House event, and later tested positive. That led to other employees having to isolate until they recorded negative tests. At the two pubs he owns, he expected to do more than $160,000 in trade over the week leading up to Christmas. Instead he has earned a little over $30,000.
“And I’m one of the lucky ones because I can still be open on a skeleton staff,” he said.
“But if you’ve got no customers and no staff why would you stay open?”
The situation has prompted the city’s lord mayor, Nuatali Nelmes, to write to the prime minister, Scott Morrison, and the NSW premier, Dominic Perrottet, to call for the jobsaver payment for small businesses to be reinstated, and to extend the pandemic leave disaster payment to workers whose business have closed due to staff shortages.
“The flow-on effects from the sharp rise in case numbers and household contacts has been widespread devastation for local businesses, particularly for tourism, hospitality and retail businesses,” she wrote.
“Thousands of businesses are facing severe staff shortages, meaning that many have made the difficult decision to cease trading until the New Year. This is in stark contrast to expectations, even a week ago, of the best trading week of the year.”
At the same time, surging demand for booster vaccinations has prompted pharmacists to beg the federal government for increased supplies, citing a substantial shortfall of jabs. Anthony Piggott, who owns a chain of pharmacies in the Hunter, said he ordered extra doses immediately after the federal government announced it had shortened the eligibility time period for booster shots to five months on 12 December. They still haven’t arrived.
“We’re now expecting to get them on Christmas Eve,” he said. “We’re getting literally hundreds of calls a day about this, and I can only vaccinate a fraction of them.
“The demand has gone up by at least 10 times since then. We’re completely over-subscribed.”
Luke Kelly, the president of the Newcastle and Hunter Valley Pharmacists Association, says chemists across the region are experiencing the same thing.
“Delivery and the 14-day wait between placing an order and having it delivered is just crazy,” he said.
“It’s putting everyone under a lot of pressure. People are trying to do the right thing to get their boosters and we have to send them away. There’s one single state-run hub in Belmont [a suburb about half-an-hour’s drive from the centre of Newcastle] and we don’t have the world’s greatest public transport.
“It’s extraordinary. A combination of the outbreak and the change in the eligibility for boosters has just dramatically increased the demand.”
So far the federal government has not moved to increase supply to the region. When the local Labor MP, Sharon Claydon, wrote to the federal health minister, Greg Hunt, about the “unacceptable shortage” of boosters in Newcastle, she was told there was no issue.
“Supply is not an issue and there are sufficient doses to ensure everyone in Australia who is eligible for a booster dose can receive it over the festive period,” Hunt’s chief of staff wrote in a response seen by the Guardian.