STATE OF PLAY NSW March 2022: it's not just flooding that appears to be going on forever in NSW, COVID-19 disease is too

 

In New South Wales as at 4pm on Sunday 6 March 2022 there were 9,017 confirmed new cases of COVID-19 and 108,980 active COVID-19 cases across the state composed of people who had tested positive in the last 14 days.

A total of 1,066 people with COVID-19 disease were currently in hospital, with 49 in intensive care and of these 14 requiring ventilation.

As of week ending 28 February 2022 there had been 39,481 cases of COVID-19 being managed at home or in insecure accommodation.

Five people had died as a result of COVID-19 in the 24 hours up to 4pm 6 March 2022 – 4 women and 1 man with ages ranging from in their 60s to in their 80s.

That brought the total number of NSW COVID-19 deaths since the pandemic began in 2020 to 1,948 individuals.

In the Epidemiological Week 9 ending 5 March 2022 the Omicron variant (B.1.1.529) was the dominant COVID-19 variant of concern circulating in the NSW community, with both of the main sub-lineages of the Omicron variant (BA.1 and BA.2) circulating in the state – infecting 1,208 people.

The average number of COVID-19 PCR tests which were positive in the week ending 5 March was 12.1% (a jump of 2.5 % since the preceding week) and above the 3% positivity considered by WHO as indicating a level of disease containment.

In Northern NSW there were 136 confirmed new cases in the 24 hours up to 4pm 6 March 2022, with 7 COVID-19 positive patients in local hospitals.

The 136 new confirmed cases in the 7 local government areas within the Northern NSW Local Health District were distributed as follows:

NOTE: The following postcode list may not be complete due to changes to the location data set.

Tweed Shire – 43 cases across postcodes 2484, 2485, 2486, 2497, 2489, 2490;

Clarence Valley – 44 cases in postcode 2460;

Lismore City – 14 cases in postcode 2480;

Ballina Shire – 12 cases in postcodes 2477, 2478;

Byron Shire – 10 cases in postcodes 2481, 2482;

Kyogle Shire – 6 cases in postcode 2474;

Richmond Valley – 6 cases in postcode 2470;

Tenterfield – 1 cases in postcode 2475; Tenterfield is not in the Northern NSW Local Health District but shared postcodes are included in Northern NSW data.

Over the next 3 days the daily confirmed new COVID-19 cases grew by 13,018 on 7 March, 13,179 cases on 8 March and 16,288 cases on 9 March. Deaths over those 3 days increased by a total of 18 individuals.

As at 4pm on Thursday 10 March 2022 there were 14,034 confirmed new cases of COVID-19 and 133,783 active COVID-19 cases across the state composed of people who had tested positive in the last 14 days. At 3pm 10 March the national total of active COVID-19 cases was 245,042 people.

A total of 998 people with COVID-19 disease were currently in hospital, with 39 in intensive care and of these 15 requiring ventilation.

As of week ending 9 March 2022 there had been 57,635 cases of COVID-19 being managed at home or in insecure accommodation.

Nineteen people had died as a result of COVID-19 in the 24 hours up to 4pm 10 March 2022 – 5 women and 14 men with ages ranging from in their 50s to in their 90s.

That brought the total number of NSW COVID-19 deaths since the pandemic began in 2020 to 1,985 individuals.

In Northern NSW there were 140 confirmed new cases in the 24 hours up to 4pm 10 March 2022, with 7 COVID-19 positive patients in local hospitals.

The 140 new cases in the 7 local government areas within the Northern NSW Local Health District were distributed as follows:

NOTE: The following postcode list may not be complete due to changes to the location data set.

Tweed Shire – 42 cases across postcodes 2484, 2485, 2486, 2487, 2489, 2490;

Clarence Valley – 41 cases across postcodes 2460, 2464;

Byron Shire – 20 cases across postcodes 2481, 2482;

Kyogle Shire – 5 cases across postcodes 2474;

Lismore City – 14 cases across postcode 2480;

Ballina Shire – 11 cases across postcodes 2477, 2478;

Richmond Valley – 7 cases across postcodes 2469, 2470, 2473;

By 24 February 2022 flooding had begun within the boundaries Northern NSW Local Heath District (NNSWLHD). In the 24 hours up to 4pm on that date the number of confirmed new COVID-19 cases in Northern NSW stood at 281 cases, with 29 currently in hospital including 4 in intensive care. One death was reported.

By 28 February at the height of Northern Rivers flooding the number of confirmed new COVID-19 cases was reported as being 220 cases, with 20 in hospital including 2 in intensive care.

At which point the number of people being tested for COVID-19 in Northern NSW was falling well below 200 a day. On 10 March 2022 NNSWLHD stated:

While there has been a decrease in the number of COVID-19 cases reported in Northern NSW over the past week as people understandably prioritised the immediate flood response, case numbers have been increasing more generally across NSW during this same period.

This suggests there may be a substantial number of potentially unreported COVID-19 cases in Northern NSW at present. [my yellow highlighting]

NSW: You have a problem that you need to do something about. pic.twitter.com/Yimr6DrDFX

— Alan Baxter ♛ (@AlanBixter) March 9, 2022

As at 4pm on Friday 11 March 2022 there were 12,850 confirmed new cases of COVID-19 and 139,873 active COVID-19 cases across the state composed of people who had tested positive in the last 14 days.

A total of 966 people with COVID-19 disease were currently in hospital, with 40 in intensive care and 15 of these requiring ventilation.

As of 11 March 2022 there was no new data revealing the number of cases of COVID-19 being managed at home or in insecure accommodation.

Four people had died as a result of COVID-19 in the 24 hours up to 4pm 10 March 2022 – 1 woman and 3 men with ages ranging from in their 70s to in their 90s.

That brought the total number of NSW COVID-19 deaths since the pandemic began in 2020 to 1,989 individuals.

In the week ending Friday 11 March 2022 there were 83,035 confirmed COVID-19 cases recorded in NSW and the preceding week there had been 63,334 confirmed cases recorded. This represents a case number growth of 19,701 people.

In Northern NSW there were 176 confirmed new cases in the 24 hours up to 4pm 11 March 2022, with 8 COVID-19 positive patients in local hospitals and 1 death recorded of a person aged in their 70s from the Byron region.

The 176 new cases in the 7 local government areas within the Northern NSW Local Health District were distributed as follows:

NOTE: No postcodes available as location data set not yet updated

Tweed Shire – 49 cases

Clarence Valley – 43 cases

Lismore City – 34 cases

Ballina Shire – 20 cases

Byron Shire – 18 cases

Kyogle Shire – 7 cases

Richmond Valley – 5 cases

NSW Health reported for the 24 hours up to 4pm Friday 11 March 2022:

Data provided in the latest weekly report indicates that reported cases of COVID-19 have increased in NSW, while hospital and intensive care unit (ICU) admissions for people with COVID-19 have stabilised during the last two weeks after previously declining.

Reported daily cases of COVID-19 in NSW have increased from 9,466 on 4 March to 12,850 today. Reported case rates continue to be highest in people aged 10-19 years. [my yellow highlighting]

The Omicron variant (B.1.1.529) is currently the dominant COVID-19 variant of concern circulating in the NSW community, with both main sub-lineages of the Omicron variant (BA.1 and BA.2) identified.

As at 4pm on Saturday 12 March 2022 there were 13,093 confirmed new cases of COVID-19 and 146,715 active COVID-19 cases across the state composed of people who had tested positive in the last 14 days.

A total of 965 people with COVID-19 disease were currently in hospital, with 44 in intensive care and 20 of these requiring ventilation.

As of  12 March 2022 there was no new data revealing the number of cases of COVID-19 being managed at home or in insecure accommodation.

Seven people had died as a result of COVID-19 in the 24 hours up to 4pm 12 March 2022 – 4 women and 3 men with ages ranging from in their 40s, 50s, 70s to in their 80s & 90s.

That brought the total number of NSW COVID-19 deaths since the pandemic began in 2020 to 1,996 individuals.

In the week ending Saturday 12 March 2022 there were 87,091 confirmed COVID-19 cases recorded in NSW and the preceding week there had been 66,521 confirmed cases recorded. This represents a case number growth of 20,570 people.

In Northern NSW there were 130 confirmed new cases in the 24 hours up to 4pm 11 March 2022, with 9 COVID-19 positive patients in local hospitals. 

The 130 new cases in the 7 local government areas within the Northern NSW Local Health District were distributed as follows:

NOTE: No postcodes available as location data set not yet updated

Tweed Shire – 31 cases

Clarence Valley – 28 cases

Lismore City – 22 cases

Byron Shire – 29 cases

Ballina Shire – 11 cases

Richmond Valley – 8 cases

Kyogle Shire – 1 cases

As of 12 March 2022 there are est. 2,264 active COVID-19 cases in Northern NSW Local Health District.

NSW Health continues to suggest that there may be a substantial number of potentially unreported COVID-19 cases in Northern NSW at present due to social and physical disruption during the February-March 2022 Flood.

As at 4pm on 12 March 2022 only 4,948,656 men, women and children in NSW are fully vaccinated (3 doses COVID-19 vaccine) out of an est. resident population of 8,189,266 people. This represents est. 60.42% of the state's total population.  [my yellow highlighting]

"COVID-19 cases are expected to double in the next four to six weeks as a new, more transmissible version of the Omicron strain spreads across Australia. 

Although there’s no evidence yet that it causes more severe illness, BA.2 is about 25% to 30% more transmissible, a key concern with many Queensland and NSW residents displaced and homeless after the devastating floods." [Crikey, 11 March 2022] 

UPDATE

Some truths about #covid19. It may not be what you want to hear, but it is what you NEED to hear. #Medtwitter #health @nswhealth ⁦@GregHuntMP⁩ ⁦@BradHazzard⁩ pic.twitter.com/dPCmIzAz1J

— Prof Kerryn Phelps AM (@drkerrynphelps) March 14, 2022

Northern Rivers Flood February-March 2022: surveying the aftermath from the air in Lismore, Ballina and beyond

From Northern Rivers activist film maker Cloudcatcher Media's March 2022 flood aftermath in Lismore, Ballina and beyond....

 

 

Widespread flooding began in earnest in the Northern Rivers region around 24 February 2022, but entered record level territory in some areas on Saturday 26, Sunday 27 and Monday 28 February.

Cartoons of the Week

Mark David

Cathy Wilcox

Alan Moir

Tweet of the week

NSW: You have a problem that you need to do something about. pic.twitter.com/Yimr6DrDFX

— Alan Baxter ♛ (@AlanBixter) March 9, 2022

Northern Rivers Flood February-March 2022: going into little Coraki, est. population 1,930

Coraki, Northern NSW, as the flood waters recede, March 2022
IMAGE: The Daily Telegraph

The Sydney Morning Herald, 11 March 2022:

The real disaster has been the failed response, writes Cam Hollows.

I'd been covering the Catholic hospital in Lismore for the first couple of days of the floods. With many other doctors cut off, we'd been treating patients offloaded from boats.

When I heard that Ballina District Hospital was being evacuated to higher ground on March 1, I threw my medical kit in the back of a four-wheel drive.

I also dressed in my wetsuit and dive boots. I had my snorkel too. As I drove into Ballina, power failed as we were passing the Big Prawn.

It was scary. I knew if we couldn't cross from West Ballina, we would be spending the night evacuating people in floodwater in the dark.

But we got to the hospital. It was a long night, treating and moving Ballina patients in a relatively orderly way to a local school where the hospital was relocated.

That night I was just another pair of hands helping out.

It was also my 40th birthday.

As the floods worsened the next day, a colleague and I offered to volunteer at one of the two major evacuation centres in Lismore only to find they were well-staffed. Many of the volunteer medics there had lost their homes or clinics but kept working.

But there was no doctor left in Coraki, the local Bundjalong's people's word for the place. Everybody in the Northern Rivers knows that Coraki - which sits on the confluence of the Richmond and Wilson rivers in northern NSW - is where floods hit worse, as it's where four of the northern rivers meet.

More than 600 people and their pets had already spent a few days crammed into an evacuation centre. With no roads in or out, they'd been cut off from help or supplies for many days.

I hitched a ride there in a JetRanger helicopter. Knowing I was of little use without medical supplies, I signed out as much as I could think of from a local base hospital. And, with help from a medical student, packed it on the chopper.

Looking down from above, it was nothing but brown water and debris as far as the eye could see. It was like Vietnam's Mekong Delta but with fewer boats.

Where Coraki is located, everything was underwater. The water had severed the town in half. Some residents were trapped on islands.

I remember thinking, "We don't need the army. We need the navy."

It smelled worse than many of the more unfortunate places I have been where there is no sewage (I used to live in Papua New Guinea).

Septic tanks were overflowing. The irony is that Coraki is a town full of plumbers who could do little to help because they'd lost their tools in the floods.

Arriving at the evacuation centre in the Uniting Church, I found local nursing, fire and SES staff and volunteers dead on their feet but still functioning. Who knows how? Again, many volunteers there had lost their homes but not their spirits.

They were working in a room filled with human misery. As a medical student, I had spent three months in a trauma hospital in Vietnam. Needless to say, that was better equipped than Coraki last week.

For the next two days and nights, I only napped on a bed requisitioned from a "state of the art" health facility disabled by lack of power and planning.

Together, volunteers and I established a functioning resuscitation centre and a wound clinic.

We treated locals whose feet looked like bags of mince. We patched up rescuers so they could get back on boats. Oldies had run out of medicine. There were loads of sore tummies, and sick and scared kids.

Mental health was a challenge for all generations.

I reviewed a patient's arm that had been savaged by a kangaroo. Locals said they had treated a range of these injuries from roos that had panicked in rising waters.

Before I arrived, local nurses - many stranded from jobs in nearby towns - had triaged patients for medical evacuations, which we started loading onto helicopters.

The locals, including a NSW health nurse who had also been stranded from work, had been doing an outstanding job. But without additional help, it couldn't last.

Until I was relieved after a couple of days, we didn't see an additional NSW or Defence Force doctor or nurse.

I relied on locals and a Queensland optometrist who had been stranded on the island. The irony of a Dr Hollows working with an optometrist was not lost on anyone.

We also had to check on the 50-bed nursing room cut off at the other end of town.

It turned out to be lucky that I had taken my defibrillator with me. A team of locals used it to resuscitate a man who had a massive cardiac arrest in the lounge room of a house nearby. People rarely come back to life outside a hospital.

For the vast majority of my time in Coraki, communication was cut off, and rumours were flying everywhere, one of which turned out to be true. I worried when I heard there was a woman who was pregnant with a severe medical condition who had been sling-lifted to the evacuation centre to Coraki from her trapped home. We finally found her and organised to get her airlifted to safety.

I was very relieved when replacements arrived, former medical colleagues with whom I had shared many sick patients and night shifts in the past.

I got home on Saturday to find a letter from my six-year-old daughter, written while I was away. "Dad, don't want you to go." She wrote she was "wuryd".

I returned to Coraki last Tuesday, the ninth day of the flood. Apart from phone coverage which I had helped organise, no doctor had yet to visit the nursing home. Yet again, aged care had been forgotten.

Australia is a nation where battlers survive natural disasters. But the real disaster was the lack of planning and failed response from government. Our weather has changed, but it is clear our government hasn't kept up.

There are still plenty of people in Coraki - and other places heavily impacted by flooding - living in tents, shelters and cars. I can patch up wounds, but the mental health scars will remain long into the future.

Please be careful putting your hand in your pocket to help out, especially if you can't afford it. Instead, ask what the government has done with the money it has already taken from you in taxes.

Cam Hollows is a doctor in the Northern Rivers and a member of the Hollows Foundation, which his father Fred Hollows, an ophthalmologist, set up. It has restored sight to more than 2.5 million people and distributed 100 million doses of antibiotics for trachoma to prevent blindness. 

Ballina Hospital evacuation to higher ground at local high school
IMAGE: Daily Mail: Australia, 2 March 2022

The 43 seconds when without a moment's thought Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison betrayed the Widjabul Wia-bal people, the unique biodiverse & culturally significant Channon Gorge and the clear wishes of what appear to be a majority of Lismore residents

Listen to this part of Prime Minister Scott Morrison's question and answer segment at the end of his Wednesday 9 March 2022  press conference in Lismore in the NSW Northern River region. 

This is the sacred land, with gorge, watercourse, ancient stone burials and secret business places that Morrison supports destroying. The place where once the water is stopped from flowing freely will permanently inundate core endangered Koala habitat and eradicate endangered Eastern Freshwater Cod breeding habitat.

And for what? The proposed 50 gigalitre Dunoon Dam on Rocky Creek in a catchment area of roughly 50 sq km, even when combined with the existing 14 gigalitre dam on the same creek, would never mitigate or stop flooding of Lismore City and environs.   

I note that Morrison openly blames unspecified Northern Rivers residents who have "resisted" flood mitigation measures (hold all term which includes dams and levees) for the frequency and severity of flood events in recent years.

NSW North Coast Local Land Services is looking for a full-time Emergency Management Coordinator in March 2022

Given the adverse weather events currently being experienced across Northern NSW and climate change promising more unwelcome experiences to come, I'm not sure whether this would be considered an enviable job......

Echo, 8 March 2022:

So, you think you can manage an emergency?

Lismore flood. Photo Darren Bridge

All over the Northern Rivers, amateur crisis response co-ordinators have filled a vacuum left by under-resourced and under-prepared official agencies.

Most community volunteers have felt little other choice and getting paid for the pleasure of helping their neighbours is unlikely to enter their minds.

But doesn’t hard work deserve decent pay? Like, around the $100K mark?

Perhaps it’s time we reconsidered a disaster response system based largely on volunteerism, especially when studies in recent years show fewer and fewer Australians have time to volunteer thanks to work and family pressures.

Emergency work in paradise 

Live and work in Paradise! Photo supplied.

Enter: the NSW government’s Emergency Management Coordinator.

It’s a newly advertised position with a starting salary of around $99K plus super.

An ad for the full time Local Land Services job position earlier this week said it included responsibility for the central & North Coasts including Newcastle, the Hunter Valley, Port Macquarie, Lismore and the Far North Coast.

The job location was negotiable, the ad said…..

The Emergency Management Coordinator would have to be adept at ‘functioning in an operating environment of change where risks and issues require challenging responses’, the ad read.

Other requirements for the role were:

• demonstrated experience in emergency response management situations;

• an ability to negotiate with stakeholders and customers;

• an ability to plan and make recommendations with respect to preparedness for, response to and recovery from biosecurity and natural disaster emergencies impacting landholders;

• previous experience in managing and undertaking a range of projects and associated activities with a view to achieving outcomes.

The successful candidate also needed a current NSW Driver License and an ‘ability and willingness to travel throughout the North Coast Region, including overnight stays’, the ad read.

The new Emergency Management Coordinator would have to report to the government’s ‘Team Leader Partnerships’, form productive relationships with regional stakeholders and provide advice to landholders.......