Public Health director Mark Veitch has said traditional contact tracing was abandoned when the highly infectious Omicron strain of COVID-19 entered Tasmania as few locations would have had no risk of infection.
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Dr Veitch told a parliamentary committee last week the state spent 2021 preparing for COVID-19 to spread in Tasmania as mainland states managed the Delta strain with ramped up use of check-in apps and hotspot alerts.
He said during the time, Tasmania was fortunate to be free of COVID-19 incursions.
Dr Veitch said when Omicron cases started to mount in the state following the reopening of borders, it became clear that infection risk covered Tasmania as a whole.
"There were very few places where you would constantly say no-one was at risk and it would have been misleading to the public to be overly specific when we needed a really general precautionary approach and awareness that you could get COVID," he said.
"With that rapid transition up to widespread infection, it wasn't feasible to be listing specific sites.
"What we did do at that stage was focus our public health management on most at-risk settings."
Dr Veitch said Tasmanians with COVID-19 were reporting about eight contacts outside their household per day after borders reopened which escalated into January.
He said the isolation period of a COVID-19 case, which had diminished from two weeks to one week, would be reviewed in the coming months.
"We still think that the appropriate strategy is to require people to isolate for a week, but obviously as we progress through the coming months, we will look as to whether or not the approach we're taking to isolation remains proportionate," Dr Veitch said.
Health Department secretary Kathrine Morgan-Wicks said prolonged waiting times for testing at sites around the state came at the toughest time of the year for the health service - between Christmas Day and New Year's Day.
"Certainly we threw every available staff member, including bringing staff back from leave, to be able to operate those PCR tests as it then was," she said.
"What we did experience was being experienced in every single state and territory in Australia," she said.
Political reporter for Australian Community Media, based in Hobart.
Political reporter for Australian Community Media, based in Hobart.
