COVID NSW: New South Wales, Victoria and Queensland record no new local cases
NSW has joined Victoria and QLD in recording no new locally transmitted cases of COVID in the last 24 hours. LATEST COVID UPDATES
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New South Wales has joined Victoria and Queensland in recording no new locally transmitted cases of COVID-19 in the last 24 hours.
There were two cases recorded in hotel quarantine from 20,347 tests across the state.
Health Minister Brad Hazzard said it was “very positive” there were no local transmissions.
“We need people to come forward and be tested. That’s the weapon we all have, as locals, as community members, to be able to ensure that our public health teams can back us in and make sure we have the correct knowledge or the absolute knowledge of what is circulating in our community,” he said.
Minister Hazzard warned local councils to be careful if they chose to hold Australia Day celebrations.
“If councils wish to have Australia Day ceremonies, and hopefully they will, they can certainly have those with up to 500 people, without any major concerns,” he said.
“They can have more than that if it’s a more structured environment, up to a couple of thousand.”
Meanwhile, the chief medical officer has revoked a COVID-19 classification for Sydney’s northern beaches after the region brought a pre-Christmas outbreak under control.
The northern beaches were declared a hot spot on December 18, with residents forced into lockdown in the lead-up to Christmas.
The number of cases linked to the cluster stands at 151, but chief medical officer Paul Kelly said a recent downturn in transmission had prompted the listing to be removed.
The move paves the way for states and territories to remove restriction imposed on the region.
NSW recorded just one case of community transmission on Wednesday, a child who was a household contact of a known case linked to the Berala cluster.
NSW TRACES RESIDENTS LINKED TO QLD HOTEL
Queensland has recorded no locally transmitted cases of Covid-19 with investigations underway into how a dangerous strain of the virus escaped hotel quarantine.
There were four cases found in hotel quarantine and 13,061 tests were recorded.
In total there are now 27 active cases.
Queensland Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk said there was an investigation underway into how the dangerous UK strain of COVID-19 escaped the Grand Chancellor hotel.
“I can also confirm now that 226 staff have also been contacted and are being tested and isolated. And along with the 147 former guests of the hotel, this number has been revised down from yesterday, and so far three-quarters of those have been contacted and tested,” she said.
“In more good news - 406 contacts of the cleaner and her partner have been contacted, tested and are isolating. So far none of them has tested positive. The investigation is still underway. We won’t be commenting daily on that investigation.”
Chief Medical Officer Jeannette Young said the cleaner, who contracted the virus at the Grand Chancellor, did not do anything wrong after alerting health professionals.
“I am very confident that we have found the close contacts of both the cleaner and her partner and because we had those three days that people weren’t leaving their home and people followed those instructions brilliantly, then I have very little concern that that spread in the community, so we’re testing all of those people,” she said.
Meanwhile, NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian is confident health experts will be able to cope with new strains of COVID-19 after it was revealed NSW residents had been in the hotel.
Airconditioning is among the sources being probed as a potential cause of the six-person cluster of the UK virus linked to the hotel, which resulted in the extraordinary evacuation of the yesterday.
Anyone now in NSW who was at the hotel from December 30 has been told to immediately get tested and isolate for 14 days since they were last there.
“NSW Health is working with Queensland Health to identify these people so our contact tracers can provide public health advice and updated information as it becomes available,” the statement said.
Mystery surrounds the outbreak at the Grand Chancellor. Genomic sequencing has linked all six cases to the highly infectious UK COVID-19 variant, dubbed B117.
But health experts are at a loss to explain how the cleaner became infected or how a father and his adult daughter, recently returned from Lebanon, contracted the virus at the hotel, rather than while they were overseas.
Despite fears of the highly contagious strain, Ms Berejiklian said she was confident health experts in NSW will be able to cope.
When asked whether NSW would support using detention or mining camps for quarantine purposes, as is being discussed in Queensland, she said no decisions would be made yet.
“I have confidence in the integrity of the quarantine system, but what we have to accept, and this is the hard reality, mistakes are going to happen because when you’ve got thousands of people involved in quarantine,” she said.
“There are so many people involved in protecting us through the quarantine system. They are putting their safety on the line every day.
“Unfortunately a few seconds of distraction or human error can occur and mistakes can occur. “Even if you have the best rules in place, this virus is so contagious that it can seep out.”
VIC RECORDS ZERO CASES
Victoria has recorded no new locally transmitted COVID-19 for more than a week.
During the 24-hour testing period, 16,533 swabs were collected with no cases acquired locally, interstate or in hotel quarantine.
It comes as the Daniel Andrews government stands firm on the traffic light border system.
More than 75,000 people have applied for permits since the program began with travellers arriving at Melbourne airport from red and orange zones greeted by masked health officials.
Regional NSW and the Central Coast have been marked as orange zones under the new permit system based around coronavirus risk.
Meanwhile, a number of Victorians in hotel quarantine in Queensland are being contacted and retested for the UK coronavirus strain after returning to Victoria since December 30.
Premier Daniel Andrews said as a result of the COVID-19 fears plaguing Queensland, he said 18 people who quarantined in Brisbane’s Hotel Grand Chancellor and then returned to Victoria since December 30 will be followed up.
“We are contacting them. We are testing them. Some of them will need to isolate. Some will simply need to get a negative test,” he told reporters on Thursday.
“There’s a specific window where we believe there is some chance that because of the infections that have already been recorded in hotel quarantine, between staff and residents, and it is that UK strain, without any other link … circumstances are very much based on each person’s travel movements and when they were in hotel quarantine.”
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