NSW scales back Covid contact tracing as health system faces Omicron strain
The New South Wales government’s Covid contact-tracing system has been all but abandoned, with efforts now focused only on those in the highest risk categories.
NSW Health authorities are under increasing strain as the Covid Omicron variant pushes up hospital admissions, while its virulence means contact tracers have all but given up tracking its spread in the wider community.
A senior NSW Health official has revealed to Guardian Australia that tracing would now only be done for only those in aged and disability care, Indigenous communities and prisons.
He said, even then, staff were “flat out keeping up” with cases.
“There’s a big internal discussion about whether tracing is still worthwhile,” he said.
“People are asking ‘what’s the point of it? What are we trying to achieve?’”
With another day of long waits for Covid testing on Tuesday – and some sites turning people away – NSW politicians traded barbs over the seriousness of the state’s growing caseload.
NSW premier Dominic Perrottet dismissed claims by the Labor opposition the hospital system was at a breaking point as “utterly irresponsible” and “reckless”.
He conceded, though, staff were stretched as the state recorded more than 6,000 new daily cases on Tuesday, with 557 people in hospital, including 60 in intensive care units.
“We have the best doctors and the best nurses who have worked tirelessly and I know there is exhaustion,” Perrottet said.
“We’re in a very strong position here in the state. We are opening up, we are learning to live alongside the virus.”
However, Ryan Park, Labor’s health spokesperson, said that with more than 2,000 health staff furloughed because of Covid contact or infection, it was time for the government to call in extra help.
“We’ve got to be honest about this,” he said. “If they need federal government support, if they need federal government resources and assistance, and we have a national cabinet, ask for that help and assistance now.”
Within the health system there is a growing fatigue after months of battling to contain different Covid variants, particularly Delta and now the more virulent Omicron strain.
Guardian Australia revealed yesterday that exhausted New South Wales health workers were being pressured to return from Christmas leave as hospitals and testing facilities are crippled by surging Covid numbers and staff furloughs.
About 2,000 health workers have been furloughed across the state after being listed as close contacts, prompting NSW Health to slash the isolation time for health workers from two weeks to seven days, provided they return a negative PCR test.
Perrottet has called for the focus to shift away from case numbers.
“What is most important as we move through this next phase is our ICU numbers, [our] hospitalisation numbers,” he said.
Hospitals, though, were bracing for further increases in patient numbers, with new Covid admissions more than doubling since mid-December.
Just over half of those presenting are positive for the Omicron variant, with the rest having Delta.
One senior doctor said the number of new cases in NSW was likely far higher than 6,000 a day since many people were not able to get tested or weren’t bothering to do so.
If numbers in hospitals kept rising at the current rate “by late January, we’ll be overwhelmed”, the doctor said.
For now, though, big hospitals in Sydney, such as Liverpool in the south, have spare capacity which they did not have at the height of the Delta wave.
Perrottet said the government had made changes to the definition of close Covid contact for health workers that would allow an extra 1,000 health staff back to work. Previously staffers were unable to work following exposure to a Covid case for a fortnight, and this furlough had now been cut to seven days, he said.
Gerard Hayes, NSW state secretary of the Health Services Union, said the hospital system was not at breaking point, and the high take-up of vaccines and now boosters was making a big difference.
“The presentations at hospitals are not as bad as what they were during Delta,” Hayes said. “However, bit by bit, they’re sort of increasing.”
“There’s a fear within our members [who were] seeing a light at the end of the tunnel, and now that light’s disappearing,” he said. “There’s a lot of apprehension, a lot of fatigue, and a lot of frustration.”
Park said the government needed to “get in front of it and ensure that an exhausted system is brought back to life” with some help from the commonwealth or elsewhere.
The help could include putting more staff into testing clinics or vaccination hubs to free up staff for clinical work.
“I think the community at the moment don’t really care where they get that help from, but they can understand that [it’s needed] when they’re waiting in a queue for six or seven hours to get a test, or they’re waiting days on end to get test results,” Park said.
“They understand they need more resources and they would expect I think governments to be working cooperatively at all levels.”