Page 2036 - Week 07 - Thursday, 20 August 2020
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from 21 August, effective until 19 November 2020. I took this decision in light of the current situation across the country and based on the advice provided by the Chief Health Officer, Dr Kerryn Coleman.
The extension of the public health emergency allows the Chief Health Officer to continue to take any action or give any direction deemed necessary to protect the community from the spread of COVID-19. We need to keep public health directions in place at this time to be able to respond quickly and appropriately if there were to be an outbreak of new cases in the ACT.
From the beginning of this pandemic, the Chief Health Officer has kept the government informed of the ACT’s situation and the broader national situation. The Chief Health Officer sits on the Australian Health Protection Principal Committee, AHPPC, which provides expert public health advice to national cabinet and informs the ACT government’s response to COVID-19.
Members will be aware that the AHPPC continues to hold significant concerns at the persistently high case numbers in Victoria over the past few weeks. Along with the commonwealth and the jurisdictions, the AHPPC has worked to assist Victoria’s public health response at this critical time. It is hoped that this combined effort will bring the situation in Victoria under control soon, but ongoing community transmission continues to be a source of concern, with new cases being reported in regional Victoria and, sadly, a number of deaths reported each day.
New South Wales continues to see a relatively low but persistent number of daily cases reported. Most of these have been linked to cases and known outbreaks, and the majority have been identified in south-western Sydney. Wide rings of contact tracing around cases is ongoing and testing rates are high in affected areas.
The ACT has implemented public health directions to restrict the movement of people, which reduces the risk of the importation of the virus into the ACT.
Since the border restrictions with Victoria were implemented, the ACT Health Directorate has processed approximately 3,000 exemption applications. As at 19 August, there were almost 500 people in quarantine, with support provided by the ACT Health Directorate. These are people returning from Victoria and overseas, as well as close contacts of confirmed cases. Quarantine compliance is being monitored by ACT Policing.
On 7 August 2020, the New South Wales government introduced restrictions around people entering New South Wales from Victoria. Any person returning from Victoria to New South Wales may now only arrive via Sydney airport and must spend 14 days in hotel quarantine in Sydney directly after arriving at the airport. This decision affected a number of ACT residents who had been approved to return to the ACT in their private vehicles, as New South Wales cancelled transit permits for ACT residents returning by road, preventing them from crossing the border into New South Wales to drive home.
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