Health Department daily updates of shops and other venues in Sydney visited by COVID cases have been scrapped, except if the exposure is considered high risk.
This means the only information available to the wider community on exposure sites is a map on the NSW Health website, which pinpoints venues of concern from the last 14 days.
It appears this would unlikely to be the full picture. For example, only two locations are pinpointed in Sutherland Shire even though the number of active cases has risen to 44 - an increase of 13 in two weeks.
The change in the notification system follows contact tracers being overwhelmed as case numbers have soared and the disease has spread into regional NSW.
A statement on the NSW Health website says, "In metropolitan Sydney, contact tracing will now focus on people potentially exposed to a case in their household, at work and in a high-risk facility, including a healthcare or aged care facility, school, childcare centre, and in any location where transmission has been identified or is considered to be likely to occur".
"This revised process will reduce the large number of venues regularly identified on the NSW Government and NSW Health websites where experience has shown there to be a very low risk of infection, and allow the public to focus on those important venues, which will they will continue to be alerted to," the statement said.
"The revised process also streamlines and simplifies communications, making the response faster as well as more focused. It is critical people continue to check in to all venues using QR codes if leaving their home for essential goods or services."
The change drew strong criticism on the NSW Health Facebook page.
Comments included:
- "Streamlined = less work for contact tracer's, less information given to the public. This is a bad idea".
- "This is exactly how the virus will leak and people will stop scanning in because they will think there is no point."
- "You've capitulated and given up? Glad my family wasted 12 days in isolation after a close contact diagnosis a few weeks back.
- "So no shopping centres? As a retail employee is disheartening hear that my place of work is invalid as a workplace in the eyes of NSW Health.
- "So shopping centres are no longer an issue, or the bakery, or the butcher.. so all those people tested, worried and with lost incomes over the past 7 weeks was a total overreaction!"
- The short version "We are under resourced so we are focusing on places with the chance of getting maximum benefit"
- Please reconsider this new approach to publishing case locations in Sydney. At the start of this outbreak, Westfield Bondi Junction saw transmissions occur. Yet this venue may well be considered low risk under this new plan.
The NSW Health website map shows only two locations in Sutherland Shire where a confirmed COVID-19 case has visited while infectious in the previous 14 days, giving the address, date and time of exposure and health advice.
The two exposure venues in Sutherland Shire which are listed at present are:
- Commonwealth Bank Engadine, Exposure date Wednesday 4 August, 2:20pm to 3pm.
- Chemist Warehouse , Kingsway, Miranda. Exposure date Tuesday 3 August, 3:45pm to 4:10pm; Thursday 5 August, 7:40pm to 8pm.
The health advice in each case is to get tested immediately and self-isolate until you get a negative result.
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Murray Trembath
St George and Sutherland Shire Leader reporter covering politics, urban affairs, council, development and general community news. Email: mtrembath@theleader.com.au
St George and Sutherland Shire Leader reporter covering politics, urban affairs, council, development and general community news. Email: mtrembath@theleader.com.au
