Medical staff should be allowed to get on with their jobs without undue speculation, the AMA Tasmania said today.
President John Burgess was commenting on the rumours of a staff party in the North West that could be linked to the current coronavirus outbreak.
“Our interest is in facts, not unsubstantiated rumours,” he told TT.
The issue sparked a wildfire this morning after Australia’s Chief Medical Officer referred to it on live television. Some time later he issued a retraction, reproduced in full here:
In the interim, both Premier Peter Gutwein and Tasmanian Director of Public Health Mark Veitch had made it clear that there was no confirmation from Tasmania of the allegations.
Mr Gutwein also said that due to the serious nature of the issue the police would be pursuing it. The alleged party, Veitch clarified, had not come up during exhaustive contact tracing of all the recent cluster of cases in the North West.
“We will retrace our steps, the Tasmanian Police will be involved, and we will get to the bottom of it,” the Premier said.
“We were disappointed today to hear the news that came forward,” said Dr Burgess. “The facts will come out through the appropriate, usual Public Health and hospital outbreak investigation that occurs. It’s not really particularly helpful to be commenting on speculations before that information is available.”
“The staff and community in the North West are doing it really tough. They’ve been putting in a heroic effort over the last couple of weeks as this has unfolded. The last thing they need to here is rumours which are unsubstantiated, repeated in the local and national press.”
He said there was nothing to date which lent credence to the rumours, which supposedly started on Facebook.
“The outbreak we have seen in the North West is something that could afflict any community anywhere in the world. Our role as professionals is to learn from outbreaks when they do occur and to put the necessary safeguards in place to minimise the likelihood that similar events will occur in the future.”
“All of us have to remain eternally vigilant.” He noted that the risk of coronavirus would exist until there was a vaccine.
Dr Burgess remained optimistic that the spread of the disease could be stamped out ‘perhaps in a matter of weeks’.
“To do that we have to do it tough now. We have to get behind the effort…it’s a total effort for the whole community, not just the North West.”
Earlier
Earlier today Health Minister Sarah Courtney said the ‘decanting’ of patients from the North West Regional and Private Hospitals had occurred successfully yesterday with the transfer of 28 patients.
Three planeloads of Australian Defence Force and AusMAT (Australian Medical Assistance Team) staff are arriving today and will prepare to reset the emergency department of the NWRH as a priority. She assured that the staff were ‘clean’ and would not reinfect the hospitals.
The ‘super clean’ decontamination of the two hospitals is already under way.
Courtney said there were contingency plans in place for emergency services and anyone could ring 000 as normal in the event of an emergency.
Cancer and maternity are other priority services, with arrangements now made to treat patients in hotel rooms in Launceston.
6 new confirmed cases announced last night brought the state’s COVID-19 total to 150. Dr Veitch confirmed that over 4,500 tests had been done.
