Behind the scenes of NSW's pandemic response

Since 22 January 2020, thousands of NSW Health staff across the state, Australian Defence Force personnel, Qantas workers and even Taronga Zoo employees have played their part in the public health response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Testing, contact tracing, epidemiology, system planning and preparedness, pathology, research, media and communications, and of course our frontline hospital staff, have all worked to contribute to the state’s pandemic response.

NSW Health’s Public Health Emergency Operations Centre (PHEOC) Operations team led by epidemiologist Jennie Musto — and the contact tracing team headed by Carolyn Murray — have identified more than 31,321 close contacts associated with 3890 positive cases. The state’s PHEOC provides integrated command of the NSW Health response including undertaking contact tracing, providing expert advice and coordination of all public health services during emergencies.

Epidemiologist Jennie Musto leads NSW Health’s PHEOC Operations team.

Tracing contacts

Historically, contact tracing has been used to combat infectious diseases like measles, but has been scaled up to respond to the COVID-19 pandemic, with the development of a central NSW Health Contact Tracing team.

NSW Health's Director of Contract Tracing, Carolyn Murray.

“We’ve grown to a team of around 150 working day and night to follow up people who have been in contact with people diagnosed with COVID-19,” Director of Contract Tracing Carolyn Murray said.

“At any one time we can be working virtually across a number of workplaces, with the capability of making up to 1300 calls to the community a day.”

Murray explained that when someone is diagnosed with COVID-19, the first step is an in-depth interview to understand their movements and who they have been in contact with while infectious.

The contact team call individuals identified by the COVID-19 case, provide them with instructions for self-isolation and offer further support for the isolation period, with empathy and ongoing support being a critical part of the team’s training and ongoing duties throughout the contact tracing process.

“The aim is to have them isolated for the full incubation period of 14 days, so that should they develop symptoms themselves, they won’t have exposed anyone else to the virus.”

The infectious period is currently defined as 24 hours prior to the patient developing symptoms; however, you can be infectious without having symptoms, which is why it’s important for close contacts to follow self-isolation advice.

“An incredibly significant element of this is ensuring we engage with people in a compassionate and supportive way,” Murray said.

“Although our primary objective is contact tracing, we also need to support the person in question and make sure they have the information and advice they need given the experience can be very difficult for some to cope with, particularly if they live alone or have pre-existing conditions.

“We treat each case individually, for example if someone needs help with groceries, or they might need further one-on-one phone conversations with a trained mental health professional — then they get the support they need to make these obligations a bit easier.”

Pathology

At the time of writing, more than 2.338 million tests have been carried out in NSW to screen for COVID-19, with NSW Health Pathology supported by private clinics and GPs across the state.

Since January, the NSW Health Pathology team at the Institute of Clinical Pathology and Medical Research, in Westmead, has been working to sequence genomes of the virus to examine the origin of, and relationships between, cases. To date, the team has sequenced over 910 cases, discovered 51 genomic clusters and identified probable transmission between 91% of cases for which no epidemiological links were initially available.

Communications and media

Close to 900 multilingual COVID-19 resources have been produced for multicultural communities in NSW. Engagement on social media with multicultural communities in the state has also been outstanding. In July and August, the NSW Multicultural Health Communication Service (MHCS) organic posts on COVID-19 reached a combined total of 2,995,648 people with 73,895 engagements (likes, reactions, comments, retweets, shares and clicks) and 64,448 video views.

NSW Health’s Strategic Communications and Engagement team have issued 306 media releases and health alerts, while Premier Gladys Berejiklian, Minister for Health Brad Hazzard and Chief Health Officer Dr Kerry Chant have conducted more than 100 press conferences.

Hospital capacity

NSW Health is working towards quadrupling our ICU capacity from 500 to 2000. Hundreds of new ventilators have been delivered to date, with more on the way, and dedicated COVID-19 wards have been set up should they be required.