Papua New Guinea will go into a month-long nationwide isolation in an effort to arrest a spiralling Covid-19 outbreak that threatens to rip through the country’s fragile health system “like a tornado”, health officials say, shutting hospitals and leaving wards without sufficient staff.
Hospitals across the country have already been forced to shut wards and departments, overwhelmed by a combination of staff becoming infected with the coronavirus, surging patient demand, and swingeing budget cuts.
David Ayres, country director with Marie Stopes PNG, said dozens of health workers across the country had been infected with Covid-19, contracted through their work.
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“The health system here was fragile to begin with. Frontline health services are often delivered late, sometimes they can’t be delivered at all, because of logistical or funding constraints,” Ayres said from Port Moresby.
“When you have a tornado like this that rips into the heart of the health system the potential for a calamity is huge. That is what is scaring all of us at the moment.”
PNG’s pandemic controller David Manning announced PNG would go into a nationwide four-week isolation from Monday, with schools closed and only essential travel around the country permitted.
Masks in public places would also be mandatory.
Manning said PNG needed to adopt the “harsh control measures”, but the isolation is being imposed in the hope of avoiding a more extreme lockdown, which would involve the closure of businesses and markets, crippling the country’s economy.
By global standards, the number of confirmed cases in PNG is low: 2,351. But case numbers are rising rapidly, and still fewer than 55,000 tests have been carried out across PNG (population nearly 9 million) during the entire pandemic.
In many places outside of the capital, Port Moresby, there is no testing at all. PNG government sources say the actual case rate could be 10 times the official figure.
Port Moresby remains the centre of the outbreak, with more than 1,000 confirmed cases. Courts and government offices have shut down after judges and parliamentarians fell ill, and more than 100 workers at the country’s largest hospital, including doctors and nurses, are in isolation with confirmed infections.
But Manning said broader isolation measures were needed, and the government was prepared to impose “specific aggressive interventions going into how best we can arrest these Covid-19 surges, not only in the city, but in those provinces that are currently experiencing surges in Covid-19 cases”.
Ok Tedi mine, where testing has revealed massive infections rates among workers, is suspending its operations for a least a fortnight “to protect its workforce, communities and operation from Covid-19”. Staff will be repatriated to their home provinces.
Vital to PNG’s economy, the closure of the mine will cost PNG’s treasury upwards of 210m Kina, about US$58m.
Dr Daoni Eserom, PNG’s national control centre incident manager, said the state funeral in Port Moresby of PNG’s first prime minister and grand chief Sir Michael Somare, and his burial in Wewak in East Sepik province, attracted thousands of mourners from all over the country last week. There are fears now those memorials could act as super-spreader events, seeding the virus all over the archipelago.
“We are going to have a very serious outbreak, across the islands, and with what’s happening in Wewak, in Sepik, the burial and ceremonial mourning for our grand chief – we expect a lot more numbers to rapidly increase, especially in the Sepik.”
PNG’s largest hospital, Port Moresby General, risks being overwhelmed by burgeoning case numbers.
“When the general hospital staff reach levels where the emergency department is unable to maintain the service, then its doors will close,” the hospital’s head of obstetrics and gynaecology, Glen Mola, wrote in the Guardian.
“Then we will have people who have car accidents, knife wounds, TB, typhoid, dying in the main car park, or being sent home to their fate.
“We need a vaccine urgently, but by the time it reaches us it could be too late to save the health service of Port Moresby.”
The hospital’s chief executive, Dr Paki Molumi, said wards were already full, and the hospital was unable to isolate Covid patients from the general hospital population.
“We are overstressed. This is beyond our capacity.”
Other hospitals around the country – including Mount Hagen – have already shut wards because of massive budget cuts. Some hospitals have received only one-third of the money needed to remain open, and have been forced to halt services just as Covid cases surge.
Eight thousand doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine from Australia’s domestic stocks will be sent to PNG next week, and Australia has also requested – and will pay for – 1m doses of vaccine from AstraZeneca to be given to PNG. An RAAF flight landed in Port Moresby on Wednesday delivering tents to be set up at Port Moresby General hospital to triage Covid-19 patients.
Queensland has started a mass vaccination program of the residents of its islands in the Torres Strait, some of which are within 4km of the PNG mainland. Traditional travel between PNG villages and the Australian islands – usually unrestricted – has been banned since March last year, but there remain fears that the virus could be brought into Australia through travel across the strait.
Australia will also begin vaccinating PNG residents in PNG’s western province on Australia’s northern border.
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On Thursday morning, the Queensland premier, Annastacia Palaszczuk, reported six of the eight new coronavirus cases imported into the state in the past 24 hours had come from PNG.
Queensland now has 48 active cases of Covid-19, all hospitalised, but no reported community transmission.
“Until everyone has the two doses of the vaccine, we are still going to see risks from hotel quarantine,” Palaczszuk said. “We have those highly contagious strains in our hospital … we are doing everything we can to contain this virus. We do not want it out in the community.”
Flights from PNG to Cairns have been halted, and the numbers of passengers flying into Brisbane limited.
with Reuters
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