Aboriginal doctors in regional centres are sounding the alarm about overcrowded housing as a “massive problem” that will make it very hard to stop the rapid spread of Covid-19, and are calling for the urgent provision of “good quality tents” or any safe place where people can isolate.

As territories and states including Queensland close their borders, Aboriginal health services said they must now secure the safety of vulnerable communities in regional areas, who are close to centres of infection.

They are asking the national cabinet to urgently approve plans for safe places where Aboriginal people can self-isolate or quarantine, including repurposing vacant hotels, motels, offices and rental properties.

“People are saying anything would do, even if we got some good quality tents,” Dr Jason Agostino, a GP and epidemiologist who works with the north Queensland community of Yarrabah, said. “It’s coming into dry season, and while that’s definitely not optimal, at the moment communities don’t have funded options.”

Agostino said a tent could be safer than sharing an overcrowded house.

“It seems to have been forgotten or missed that the large majority of cases in China spread within families and within households,” he said.

Yarrabah, about 50km from Cairns, has about 3,500 people but only 350 houses. Around 580 people are over the age of 50, and 80% of them have some form of chronic disease. There are 82 people over the ago of 70.

“So while we are considered remote, we are only 50km from Cairns, a large population centre with a lot of tourists, as well as local people who’ve traveled overseas and returned.”



There are currently two Covid-19 cases being managed in Cairns.

Agostino is medical advisor to the National Aboriginal Community Controlled Health Organisation (Naccho), which has been pushing for governments to make isolation space available and pitch in to help build temporary accommodation.

At Yarrabah, he said, about 70% of the health workforce lives in overcrowded houses, and keeping them healthy in coming months is vital.

Dr Jason King is senior medical officer at the Yarrabah clinic, Gurriny Yealamucka.

In 2018, King said an outbreak of mumps raced through the community and within weeks was estimated to have infected over 150 people. Half of those surveyed afterwards had been sharing a bedroom with two or more people.

“The advice we were giving people then is precisely what we’re giving people now: socially isolate to help prevent the spread,” Dr King said.

“But when you’re talking to someone who lives in a house with ten other people, they’ve got three bedrooms, one bathroom where maybe the plumbing and the tapware is not particularly functioning, their ability to self-isolate is incredibly impacted.

King echoed concerns raised by Northern Territory Aboriginal health groups last week, about long delays in testing for Covid-19.

“You have this incredibly fertile breeding ground for the rapid spread of infectious diseases in a community like this. And even when people want to be able to follow the advice to self-isolate, they just don’t physically have the ability to do that.

“It’s heartbreaking because you don’t want to be the one that brings it home to your family, and that’s the thing we’re faced with.”

Crowding in Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities occurs at around three times the rate of the non-Indigenous population, with over 115,000 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander households living in overcrowded homes nationwide.