A Cloncurry GP has called on people to avoid mass gatherings to help control the spread of COVID-19 (novel coronavirus).
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Dr Emma Gillmore said people cannot carry on normal life because there was an urgent need to slow the rate of cases occurring at any one time so that health facilities can cope with the load.
"Say, one in a thousand people need intensive care, that is fine for our hospital system if there are just 100 people with the disease they can accommodate 1 extra person in ICU but if there are 10,000 cases - that is 100 extra ICU beds of which we do not have," Dr Gillmore said.
"Therefore decisions based on triaging/prioritising certain people start to occur."
Dr Gillmore said survival rates would go down if a massive tidal wave of people get infected at the same time as we just simply cant provide the best level of care to everyone at the exact same time.
"This is an important time to be reminded of the power of hand hygiene and that common sense prevails in terms of large crowd exposure," she said.
This is an important time to be reminded of the power of hand hygiene and that common sense prevails in terms of large crowd exposure
- Dr Emma Gillmore
"If you don't need to be going there at the moment then probably just don't.
"This is not to stop you getting it but simply to slow the rate of spread so that people get the disease in manageable health care bite sizes."
Dr Gillmore said that in addition to hygiene and practising social distancing people should get this years influenza vaccination.
"It will help reduce the burden of disease in the population and therefore help reduce the strain on an already depleted health care resources," she said.
Dr Gillmore made her recommendation despite saying coronavirus might not eventuate into anything in Australia,
"If if it does fizzle out then we will have had a great practice run for next time," she said.
"However we would be extremely foolish not to learn from and act upon the strong warnings coming from places like Italy at the moment."
While social distancing has been recommended by global health agencies, and was used to effect in the 1918 Spanish Flu epidemic, it has yet to be adopted formally by Australian health authorities to mitigate the spread of the novel coronavirus.
The concept of "flattening the curve" is now a textbook public health response to epidemics, including the spread of Covid-19.
Once a virus can no longer be contained, the goal is to slow its spread.
Exponential growth in infections leaves health care systems struggling to handle the surge.
But with fewer people sick at at the time services aren't overwhelmed and deaths diminish buying time to treat the flood of patients as researchers develop vaccines and antiviral therapies.