Coronavirus update: Medical expert warns against complacency in social distancing due to Easter holidays

As the coronavirus crisis continues, Australia now has more than 5,800 cases of COVID-19 and 46 fatalities.

And with the Easter holidays upon us, it’s more important than ever that we continue to practise social distancing.

“We’ve seen this amazing community response to the call to social distance and to stay home, and people have really rallied around that call,” said Dr Darren Saunders, Associate Professor of Medical Sciences at UNSW.

“You can start to see that having an effect on the numbers in the incidence of the disease.

“But one thing that really worries me is that we get a little bit too complacent where we’re starting to see the number of daily cases drop off.

“If you look at the underlying data behind those curves, there is still a slowly-increasing rate of community-acquired or locally-acquired infections – and that’s a little bit higher in some parts of Australia than others.

“I think that’s the thing we need to be really careful about now. We need to make sure we stay on top of those underlying curves, and really, staying at home is the best way to do that.”

‘The message couldn’t be clearer’

In his address on Tuesday, Prime Minister Scott Morrison said a failure to stay at home would ‘completely undo everything we have achieved so far together.’

“Easter is a really critical time – a lot of people are understandably missing their families and a lot of people traditionally have holidays,” Saunders said.

“Everybody’s very stressed out and anxious from what we’ve been going through the past few weeks, so everybody wants a holiday.

“But the message couldn’t be clearer – don’t do it.

“Every possible interaction we have with other people at the moment is a possible source of transmission of this virus.

“We have put in so much effort over the past few weeks to get on top of that. Everybody has made sacrifices. We don’t want to undo all that hard work and sacrifice now.”

Don’t delay your medical treatments

With such strict isolation measures in place, there have also been cases of people with chronic diseases avoiding medical checkups.

So Chief Medical Officer Brendan Murphy has advised all Australians not to neglect their general health conditions during this time.

“One of the reasons we hear this thing about flattening the curve is that the rest of the health system still has to operate,” Saunders said.

“People still have these long-term conditions – they’re dealing with cancer or accidents like car crashes – so part of the reason we’re trying to dampen down the COVID-19 transmissions is to create capacity in the system to deal with all these things.

“It’s understandable that people that are scared, but a lot of GP clinics have put in place appropriate measures to ensure their safety, and they really shouldn’t be delaying treatment for other conditions.”