ACT health authorities have started to wind back their contact tracing methods to focus on those at highest risk of being infected as the territory recorded another daily high in COVID-19 case numbers.
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There were 85 new cases reported in the territory on Thursday. There were still only three people in Canberra hospitals with the virus and nobody was in intensive care.
Testing sites across Canberra continued to face immense pressure on Thursday as people sought to get their required pre-travel tests for interstate travel.
Restrictions will be reimposed on visitors to Canberra's hospitals from Boxing Day. Patients will not be allowed to have any visitors. At present two visitors per day are allowed.
NSW also reimposed some restrictions on Thursday, including mandatory face masks indoors and hospitality density limits, after recording 5715 cases - a jump of almost 2000 on the previous day.
The rapid escalation in Canberra's case numbers meant tracing efforts would be refocused on identifying close contacts who were either household contacts or those who had been exposed to a positive case for a long period.
ACT chief health officer Kerryn Coleman said the changes would bring the territory in line with how NSW and Victoria identified close contacts.
"We have been signalling this for a long time but we haven't needed to make the changes before because our case numbers have not risen to this point," Dr Coleman said .
"So a close contact will now be considered as someone who is a household contact of a case, or someone who has spent a reasonably long amount of time like four hours in the same room or the same small space in a house or other accommodation or care facility as the case while they've been infectious."
The changes also mean casual contacts will no longer be followed up and won't have to submit a declaration form to ACT Health. However, Dr Coleman said casual contacts still needed to get tested and isolate until a negative result was received.
Under the changes, business owners will not be contacted if their venue was identified as an exposure site.
"Given the large volume or increasing number of sites that become casual locations, we won't be able to contact every single location or business that becomes an exposure site before it is published on our website," Dr Coleman said.
Close contacts who were currently in quarantine but who would not be considered as a close contact under the new rules could also be released from quarantine before Christmas. Dr Coleman said authorities would work through those issues.
"If people can bear with us, the intention would be that the point in time when the public health directions are updated and these are changed that we would look at identifying and letting those people know the changes that we can do," she said.
"We'll try and get to people around that information before Christmas."
ACT government testing sites all reached capacity early on Thursday morning but health workers were able to work through the backlog and lines had shortened by the end of the day. There had been almost 3000 tests undertaken by noon.
Health Minister Rachel Stephen-Smith said she expected demand for pre-travel tests would wane over the coming days and testing sites would be back to normal.
She said testing capacity had been constrained by staff shortages as many had taken time off during the Christmas period and this made it difficult to open extra testing sites.
"[Health services] need to allow staff to take some downtime at this time of year, people have leave and things booked in," Ms Stephen-Smith said.
"There comes a point where there's a work health and safety responsibility that you must allow your staff to take leave and not keep asking staff to work extra overtime [and] extra shifts.
"That has been a constraint for the last couple of days, not whether there was another physical location."
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Canberrans may also struggle to get their booster shots before the New Year.
The ACT mass vaccination hub at the AIS Arena will be closed from Christmas Eve until January 3.
Ms Stephen-Smith said pharmacies and GPs would continue to administer vaccines but this would also be limited.
ACT Pharmacy Guild president Simon Blacker warned Canberrans will be "hard pressed" to find a booking before January 3 via pharmacies, which were "at capacity".
Mr Blacker said pharmacists were not given a "heads up" when the government cut waits from six to five months, and were rushing to cover an abruptly expanded cohort.
Most were now shifting away from walk-in boosters to focus on clearing booking backlogs, he said.
"Pharmacies and GPs have been scrambling to get more vaccines into the practices since then, as demand has also gone through the roof," he said.
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