South Australia records two likely new coronavirus cases

SA has recorded two new COVID cases – one an overseas traveller and the other a possible infection in a man who was at Sydney Airport.

SA Health chief public health officer Nicola Spurrier. Picture: NCA NewsWire / Roy VanDerVegt

South Australia has recorded two new coronavirus cases – a man in his 70s who returned from overseas and a man in his 20s who spent time in Sydney Airport.

Both are now in medi-hotels along with four close contacts of the younger man, who is suspected to have an old infection, which is not linked to the outbreak at Avalon.

The man flew from Darwin to Sydney Airport on December 18. It has since emerged there was a positive case on-board although the man was not seated nearby.

He caught a regional flight to Wodonga in regional Victoria before driving to Maitland on Yorke Peninsula having arrived in SA in the early hours of December 21.

The man returned a weak positive result on December 22.

SA Health chief public health officer Nicola Spurrier said the man underwent a serology blood test to determine whether the infection was old or new.

“When you get a weak positive result it may be that this is a new case developing or it may be that it’s actually viral shedding,” Prof Spurrier said.

“Even when you’ve recovered from COVID-19 you can still be producing fragments of the virus in the back of the nose and it can be picked up on a swab.

“It’s my understanding that this is likely to be an old infection and therefore nobody in South Australia is at any risk but I will need to have that verification.”

Prof Spurrier said the man was believed to have been in Victoria during the height of the pandemic outbreak in that state.

She said the man had never previously had coronavirus symptoms or been tested but that people would have been asymptomatic at the time.

The other positive case returned to SA from Doha, Qatar, aboard Qatar Airways flight QR914 on December 18. He returned a negative test on day one but a positive test on day five.

Prof Spurrier said more than 5000 coronavirus tests were processed on Wednesday.

“No matter where you are in South Australia there is always a risk of COVID-19,” she said.

It brings the total number of SA active cases to four. The three other cases – a woman aged in her 60s and two women aged in their 20s – are overseas arrivals quarantined in medi-hotels.

There have been a total of 568 cases in SA. The Avalon cluster grew by seven cases on Thursday to a total of 104.