The ACT is set to move away from publishing every venue a COVID-positive case has visited, as the territory gets set to emerge from lockdown.
Health authorities have said there would be a point in time where not every exposure site in Canberra would be published online, with vaccination rates in the ACT increasing.
It comes as ACT Chief Health Officer Kerryn Coleman will provide on Tuesday a major update on the COVID-19 outbreak in Canberra, which has now surpassed 1000 cases. Five COVID-related deaths have been recorded, all of whom were aged in their 80s and 90s and already receiving end-of-life care.
Tuesday will also see a return to the classroom for some ACT students, with Year 12 students able to return but only for practical classes and assessments, along with some Year 11 students.
Dr Coleman said as Canberra neared the end of its lockdown on October 15, there would be changes to how exposure sites would be reported.
“Those ‘monitor’ and ‘casual’ sites will be less important as the focuses switches from trying to find every case to finding those ones that have a bigger impact,” Dr Coleman said.
“It’s one of the considerations we’re looking at for how the public health response changes in the next month or two.”
The chief health officer said considerations were also being made to have positive cases alert their close contacts themselves, rather than the work be carried out by health staff.
Dr Coleman said a nuanced consideration of risk was being outlined for potential changes to quarantine arrangements for ACT healthcare staff.
State and territory leaders have written to federal Health Minister Greg Hunt calling for additional health resources to help deal with a predicted COVID-19 surge once lockdowns have eased.
Prime Minister Scott Morrison rebuffed Queensland Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk’s demand for more health funding in exchange to reopen the state’s borders, calling the move “shakedown politics”.
However, ACT Chief Minister Andrew Barr described the prime minister’s comments as unhelpful.
“This is not a party political thing, it’s not Labor versus Liberal, this is simply about what we need to do across all levels of government for our health system to manage, what is I hope, a once-in-a-lifetime experience,” he said.
The ACT reported 28 new cases of COVID on Monday, half of those being linked to known cases.
A further two deaths were recorded, both women in their 80s, taking the death toll from the current outbreak in Canberra to five and the total since the pandemic began to eight.
Mr Barr said he expected the ACT to reach a 95 per cent vaccination rate, based on the current trajectory.
The most recent government figures show 93.3 per cent of over-16s in the ACT have received their first dose, while 67.3 per cent are fully vaccinated.
AAP
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