Dear Colleagues,

What a week we’re having – it’s nice to not to be needing to report large number of cases! That’s not to say our response is slowing, we’re still hard at work on it! While it’s nice to be experiencing some positivity, it’s no time to become complacent with adhering to restrictions, social distancing and excellent hygiene. A reminder that when taking advantage of the new provision within the Home Confinement, Movement and Gathering Direction (No. 2) allowing leaving of your principal place of residence for recreation within a 50km residence, all other requirements remain in place.  We must still be cautious – a pandemic doesn’t take long weekends!

Today’s updates include:

• Changes to Visitor Restrictions across Metro North
• Our Numbers
• Scaling back of Metro North EOC

Changes to Visitor Restrictions across Metro North.

We are refining our visiting arrangements across our Metro North facilities and aligning with the Hospital Visitors Direction. This means that our patients can have a care and support visit once a day, by up to two visitors for up to two hours (socially distancing to the extent reasonably practicable). We continue to encourage maximisation of ‘virtual visits’ for all of our patients to minimise the threat to our vulnerable patients. This will be reflected on our Visitor Information internet pages before the weekend.

Our Numbers

Our total numbers for inpatients and in our virtual ward are at record lows. We currently have six inpatients across Metro North with three of these ventilated in ICU and our virtual ward is home to 23 patients. Our four remaining fever clinics are continuing to see over 200 presentations per day. This combined with our NIL confirmed cases provides me reassurance that despite widespread testing, there is no disease currently present.

Since their stand up, our Metro North fever clinics and community assessment centres have experienced over 14,000 presentations. A huge shout out to the staff in these clinics for professionally and compassionately supporting this large number of presentations.

Scaling back of Metro North EOC.

Today, we literally halved the size of our Metro North Emergency Operations Centre. This downscale is due to the slow in the number of positive COVID-19 cases across Metro North and the current state of our preparedness.

For those of us who remain in the EOC, there is still plenty of work to be done and we continue to work to refine our preparedness, reporting and transparency. We are fully prepared to flex up back to full capacity should the demand arise.

I know this is brief, but considering the amount of information, news and media we have all been consuming on COVID-19, I think we should consider ‘small’ news is good news!

Thank you for your continued work and commitment to our COVID-19 response.

Kind regards,
Dr Liz Rushbrook
Metro North Health Incident Controller

Metro North HHS – Overview of Cases*

*With effect 1000 30 April 2020

**Metro North has three recorded deaths (one person a return traveller into NSW, who passed away in NSW)

*** These numbers reflect the cases being managed by Metro North