Anthony Byrne (Holt, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

On 3 January this year, I received a message from someone who has a longstanding interest in epidemiological and pandemic reports and who drew my attention to a report from the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy in Minnesota. This report highlighted a cluster of cases of identified viral pneumonia in Wuhan, China with suspected links to a local seafood market. For those who can recall the 2002-2003 SARS virus outbreak, I'm sure the significance of the report wasn't lost. Within days of this report and the international and Australian media reporting on this outbreak, we saw the first spread of the virus outside of China and the identification of the virus as coronavirus.

In the following weeks, we've seen the first cases emerge in Australia from overseas travellers as well as those returning to quarantine from the ill-fated Diamond Princess cruise ship docked in Japan. Sadly, the first Australian death from the disease has also been confirmed in the last couple days. We 're also starting to see the economic cost of this disease, with education and tourism providers likely to be the most effected in the short term. In recent days, there has been an announcement by the Prime Minister that the country is operating under the assumption that a global pandemic will be declared. Given that the likelihood of infection and the infection and case fatality rates coming out and emerging in a number of countries are likely to be inaccurate, I would agree with and endorse this course of action.

As an example and as a reason why, a paper released a week or so ago by six epidemiologist based in Canberra, using mathematical modelling and taking into account the number of exported cases, has estimated a case count of the coronavirus in Iran of being more than 18,000 cases. This is in comparison to the 593 cases that the World Health Organization is reporting for Iran. A co-author of the paper, infectious disease specialist Isaac Bogoch, commented, 'When a country exports cases to other destinations it's very likely that the burden of infection in this country is significant.'

We are now starting to see the impact of this in Australia. Even today, we are hearing reports of the first community human-to-human transmission of this virus. How serious this disease will ultimately be is unknown at this stage. The case fatality rate is clearly higher than that of the seasonal flu. However, it is not clear how much higher and whether it has been distorted by unreported, non- or low-symptomatic cases, as happened during the 2009 swine flu outbreak. What we do know is this disease is proving more infectious than SARS. We know it can be spread by aerosols through coughing and sneezing. It can also be spread by those not exhibiting any symptoms. We know it can be spread by touching fomite—surfaces—with estimates that the virus can remain active between two hours and nine days, depending on the surface type and air conditioning.

We know that there are experienced and well-respected people in their fields of study who were not surprised by the emergence of this disease. The Prime Minister said, speaking last Tuesday in the context of the budget, 'Hands up those who thought there was going to be a coronavirus epidemic when the budget was released last May.' Of course, no-one did. On behalf of those in the infectious disease field, who have been saying for some time 'When, not if,' in relation particularly to zoonotic disease—those passed from animals to humans—I would hazard a guess that those in that community would have raised a few hands in response to this comment.

The Australian Medical Association has been calling for the establishment—and I would support this—of a Australian national centre for disease control for a number of years, highlighting the need for a national body that, amongst other roles, can provide trusted, authoritative and accurate medical information in response to health emergencies such as epidemics and pandemics. This call was backed by the Australasian Society for Infectious Diseases. Their president, Josh Davies, explained in a recent news article that a model similar to the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control would be preferable to a model styled on the US Centres for Disease Control and Prevention, which is a much larger and more expensive institution. Speaking of a potential model, Professor Davies describes one that would be far less expensive with our existing infrastructure but act as an umbrella body overlaying it.

Currently, there's a federal government and eight state and territory governments providing advice in relation to this outbreak. The situation has been causing some confusion. For example, we've seen differing advice from federal and state education departments about students returning to school from overseas. We have seen diving advice to GPs about which face masks should be worn and differing advice about testing for coronavirus depending on the country of origin. Now, I don't want to be alarmist about what we might confront, but we should be prepared for it. I do believe that, particularly in the age of disinformation and fake news, we need an authoritative body in the short term and the long term, and I think a centre for disease control established in Australia would be a body to be able to deal with that issue.