Rapidly-increasing COVID-19 infections in hospitals in Papua New Guinea are hitting its fragile health system “like a tornado” as Australia launches measures to halt the virus escaping from its neighbour.
Australia is sending 8000 vaccine doses, responding to a request for urgent assistance for the country’s small health workforce of 5000 nurses and doctors.
It is also taking steps to stop the virus escaping PNG into Australia with a only a short boat trip separating the two nations.
Passenger flights from PNG to Cairns have been suspended for a fortnight, while fly-in-fly-out (FIFO) journeys have been suspended.
David Ayres, country director with Marie Stopes PNG, which has nurses in 13 hospitals, told Reuters health workers throughout the country were falling ill.
He had received multiple reports from hospitals on Wednesday that between 10 and 25 staff had fallen ill and were off work.
Sections of major hospitals were shutting down and services were reduced, he said.
“The health system here was fragile to begin with. Frontline health services are often delivered late, sometimes they can’t be delivered at all, because of logistical or funding constraints,” Ayres told Reuters by telephone from Port Moresby.
“When you have a tornado like this that rips into the heart of the health system the potential for a calamity is huge. That is what is scaring all of us at the moment.”
Papua New Guinea has high rates of tuberculosis, malaria and HIV in the community and health workers fear if they are overrun with COVID cases treatment of these other diseases will suffer.
Only 55,000 COVID-19 tests have been conducted in a population of 8.78 million, where 87 per cent of people live in rural areas, many in isolated mountainous villages.
By Tuesday, PNG had reported 2351 cases and 26 deaths since the start of the pandemic, with half of the cases recorded this month, and 600 in the past week.
Over 1000 cases are in the National Capital District of Port Moresby, where the courts and government offices have shut down in recent days after judges and lawmakers fell ill.
More than 100 workers including doctors and nurses at the Port Moresby General Hospital were in isolation, The National newspaper in Port Moresby reported.
“We are over-stressed. This is beyond our capacity,” the hospital’s chief executive Dr Paki Molumi was quoted as saying.
Pamela Toliman, a scientist at the PNG Institute of Medical Research which does testing, wrote on Twitter there was a “huge lag in updating this data”, and “cases are much higher” than the tally reported on Tuesday.
ChildFund PNG country director Bridgette Thorold said staff were taking sanitiser and PPE into villages and trying to overcome “fear and stigma and misconceptions about COVID”.
PNG Prime Minister James Marape is expected to announce details of a national isolation strategy soon.
Thorold said many people earned daily cash wages by selling vegetables at markets, so a lockdown would be difficult.
