Queensland Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk (Image: AAP/Darren England)

From afar, the COVID-19 caper looks covered in Queensland — even if it’s beautiful one day, closed the next.

Our daily case numbers are currently sitting below 20 despite several exposure sites, our schools are open, along with our restaurants, beaches and sporting competitions. This is a stunning achievement, for now.

But a false sense of security hangs over the systems, processes and policies underpinning that COVID effort. That was proved repeatedly in the past week. And if — or when — COVID comes knocking at the Queensland border, we could quickly face the same challenges being experienced in NSW and Victoria, potentially without the same safeguards.

Queensland’s defence revolves around three variables: quarantine, registration and vaccination. So let’s just look at quarantine. Even without any COVID breakout, we’ve already been forced to shut that down — separating families and loved ones — because there was no room at the inn. What will happen if we endure even a modest outbreak?

Then there’s registration, which the premier and chief health officer continue to maintain is front and centre of their COVID effort. But after a NSW truckie tested positive and was found to be in the community for two days while infectious, a business in Beenleigh, just south of Brisbane, became a major exposure site. A week on, contract tracers have been unable to find out details of all those who might have been exposed because the check-in code was not being used by many on entry.

QR check-ins have been a rallying point for the state: while everyone is using the QR code, lockdown is less likely because contract tracers can be on the case. Now that the nation’s privacy watchdog has found Queensland Police accessed Check In Qld app data as part of an investigation, that push has been mightily muted. 

A recent lockdown in Brisbane involving the wealthy Brisbane Grammar School showed this pattern over and over again. In at least four cases known to this columnist, Queensland Health contacted exposure-site visitors up to eight days after they had already started to self-isolate of their own volition after seeing the news or being contacted by the school.

Eight days! What would happen if this COVID outbreak had been the one to spread across the community? Or the number of people who had to be traced was more than 1000?

In a moment of honesty, a government source says the state might have been lucky that that outbreak involved a school of professional parents who knew to do the “right thing’’ and could afford to stay home.

But where did Queensland Health then send many of those isolating parents for the required test? To a public COVID testing station, where they mixed again with the community.

And so we come to the last leg of the Queensland COVID plan: vaccination. Here the government has a job in front of it. In some pockets, vaccination levels are higher than expected. In others, particularly outside the state’s south-east, the vaccine isn’t seen as important because COVID has not yet been a visitor.

But even the state’s vaccine registration platform is failing many in need. Anyone can register, and every day a healthy young person is being given a booking ahead of an aged care worker or vulnerable community member.

That’s not the young person’s fault. They simply registered as they have been asked to. The system is not sufficiently prioritising those who need to be vaccinated early. And others are booking multiple appointments in a bid to get the best one, and then failing to cancel those other pre-booked appointments. 

Surely a working system needs to pick that up. It’s obvious that people will try to game the system to do what everyone from the prime minister down is asking them to do: get vaccinated.

There’s no consistency in the vaccine experience. At one centre in inner Brisbane, nurses are vaccinating one person every three or four minutes. Ten kilometres away in a big vaccination hub, nurses are jabbing one patient every 15 minutes or so.

Shaky quarantine, shaky contact tracing, shaky vaccination rollout. It’s no wonder that time, energy, money and resources are going into closing the borders — even at a punishing cost to divided families.

So while it looks shiny and bright, Queensland’s COVID effort is tarnished beneath the bonnet. Let’s just hope it doesn’t need to be lifted any time soon.