Coronavirus: Epping High School student’s mum worked at Ryde Hospital with stricken doctor
Authorities say a Sydney student caught the virus while his mother, who works with an infected doctor, ‘is well’.
NSW’s chief health officer Kerry Chant has revealed that the student from Epping Boys High School who has been diagnosed with coronavirus is the son of a health worker who worked at Ryde Hospital.
A doctor at the hospital was diagnosed this week with COVID-19.
It’s also been revealed that a nurse at another hospital in Sydney has tested positive for coronavirus, taking the total to 26 in NSW, 61 in Australia and almost 100,000 globally.
Epping Boys High School in Sydney’s north, attended by about 1100 students, was ordered closed on Thursday night to begin decontamination after the 16-year-old pupil in Year 11 tested positive.
A total of 61 staff from Ryde Hospital have been sent home to self-isolate, while 56 patients are in quarantine.
Dr Chant said she did not have an explanation as to how the student came to be infected when his mother had not yet tested positive. Testing is underway on her.
“The healthcare worker whose son became unwell and was tested for COVID-19 did work at Ryde Hospital and was identified as a contact of the 53-year-old (doctor from Ryde Hospital) that is now in Westmead Hospital,” she said.
“I can confirm that that healthcare worker is well but the child did have symptoms, and the child was tested for COVID-19 and that has come back as a positive result.
“We’re also investigating the household and as is usual process we interview and identify any close contacts.”
Dr Chant said she was confident no-one was at further risk at Ryde Hospital.
“Ryde Hospital has taken extensive actions …. we are in daily contact with all of the staff that have been put into home isolation,” she said.
“Because those individuals have been removed from the healthcare setting for over 24 hours, no-one is placed at risk and that’s the whole purpose of our very precautionary quarantining of the close contacts.
“We obviously have to investigate all scenarios … including the scenario that the child has come into to contact through a different mechanism,” she said.
High school records traced
Dr Chant said authorities were currently analysing the absentee records and sick bay records of Epping Boys High School to identify any other students who may be sick.
A decision has not yet been made as to how long the school would remain closed.
“Having this day off and the fact that it’s a Friday buys us some time,” Dr Chant said. “I just ask the school community’s forbearance.”
NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian has given a grim forecast for what might lie ahead in the state with further spread of the disease certain.
“There’s no doubt that we are not anywhere near the worst of this,” Ms Berejiklian said. “We haven’t even hit the winter months.
“What we need to do is learn from what’s happened elsewhere but make sure we reduce the spread as much as possible.”
Doctors tracked
NSW health authorities have made contact with 76 of of the 77 doctors who attended a radiology seminar on February 25th that was also attended by two doctors who have tested positive for coronavirus.
Dr Chant said all of the doctors had now been cleared of COVID-19. “All have been cleared or if they have had symptoms, COVID-19 has been excluded,” Dr Chant said.
The spread of the disease accelerated on Thursday, with the biggest one-day increase since the epidemic began.
Sixty-one patients being treated by the two infected doctors are now considered at risk.
The Epping high school case is understood to involve the first child in NSW to be diagnosed with the virus, although health officials remain unclear as to how he contracted the illness.
A baby in South Australia has also been infected. The baby’s mother, a 40-year-old woman, previously tested positive to the disease. Another case involved a 58-year-old who recently returned from Taiwan.
The school will remain closed for at least one day, allowing officials to work through containment strategies. In a statement released by NSW Health, officials advised students to stay at home and stay isolated at the weekend. Staff have also been asked to stay home. “The school will provide a further update over the weekend about next steps,” the statement said.
NSW Health Minister Brad Hazzard said the teenager might have contracted the virus through contact with another coronavirus patient, making his a case of local transmission.
Mr Hazzard declared “war” on the virus earlier on Thursday but conceded it was unlikely to be contained.
“I think at this point it’s fair to say that an evolution is happening in the spread of this virus,” he said. “We are doing everything we can to try and contain it. But we also know that containment is … an unlikely outcome.
“Members of the community have to be doing everything they can do to support the endeavour to defeat what has really become a war with this virus.”
Frenetic preparations are being made in hospitals around the country to cope with an influx of COVID-19 cases. Health bosses are alarmed at signs that Australia is moving into a sustained transmission phase of the virus more quickly that had been expected.
The nation’s chief health officer, Brendan Murphy, said the federal government was “looking at scenarios from the most benign through to some millions of people being infected over a period of several weeks”.
Amid continued panic buying at supermarkets, Woolworths placed limits on the sale of rice, having already limited the sale of toilet rolls and hand sanitiser.
Woolworths chief executive Brad Banducci, in an email to loyalty customers, said the retailer would limit purchases of large bags of rice (2kg or more) to one to ensure there were enough supplies to go around.
In Tamworth, NSW, a man had to be tasered after he allegedly assaulted staff at a Big W store during an argument about toilet rolls.
Deloitte Access Economics Chris Richardson said: “The danger to the Australian economy is not the pandemic, it’s the panic.”
Two more cases were diagnosed in Queensland on Thursday and one in Western Australia.
In Sydney, major employers such as law firm Clayton Utz and Vodafone sent workers home until Monday to avoid infection.
The federal government yesterday extended its coronavirus travel ban to South Korea, while continuing the ban on foreign nationals travelling from China and Iran for another week.
The government also announced more rigorous screening of travellers from Italy, who will be asked a series of mandatory questions at check-in. Anyone failing the checks will be denied approval to board their plane. Travellers from Italy will also face questions as they pass through immigration.
The tougher travel conditions for Italy raised questions about whether this month’s Melbourne Grand Prix will be affected. Race organisers said on Thursday the event would go ahead.
In Queensland, 10 staff from Brisbane’s Mater Hospital have gone into isolation after coming in contact with the University of Queensland student who tested positive to coronavirus this week.
A spokeswoman confirmed the staff members had gone into isolation but did not reveal the positions in which they were employed.
The 20-year-old Chinese student flew into Brisbane on February 23, after spending two weeks in Dubai to circumvent restrictions preventing people from entering the country if they had been in mainland China in the previous 14 days.
He fell ill on February 25 after spending time at his home in inner-city Toowong, where he lived with a housemate.
A group of children from the Banksia Childcare Centre at Macquarie Park in Sydney’s north are being assessed after they visited an aged- care facility at the centre of a coronavirus outbreak where three residents and a nurse were infected. One of the residents, a 95-year-old woman, died on Tuesday.
The aged-care centre, the Dorothy Henderson Lodge, is in lockdown, with an emergency workforce of staff in head-to-toe protective gear caring for residents isolated in their rooms.
All visitors to the centre have been banned and NSW chief health officer Kerry Chant said she expected that more residents from the lodge would test positive for the disease.
Another 84 doctors and nurses from two hospitals who were close contacts of the two infected Sydney medics were placed into quarantine.
One of the infected doctors is a 27-year-old female emergency department registrar at Liverpool Hospital; the other is a 53-year-old male doctor from Ryde Hospital.
Health authorities do not know how they acquired the infection but both attended the same radiology seminar.
While authorities have made contact with most doctors who were at the seminar, they are yet to speak with a number of them who had not returned calls.
NSW Health said it was “closely monitoring” 56 patients treated by the Ryde Hospital doctor and five patients treated by the 27-year-old emergency department registrar.
All nurses or doctors who spent 15 minutes or more in the company of the infected doctors are in isolation.
Mass school closures remain a possibility in the event of a coronavirus pandemic.
The nation’s top education bureaucrat revealed that any decision would be governed by expert medical advice.
Department of Education secretary Michelle Bruniges told a Senate hearing in Canberra that the government’s role would be to ensure there was a universal approach to dealing with the risks.
Questioned by Labor senator Louise Pratt on whether schools and childcare centres would be shut down or children who were unwell forced to stay away, Dr Bruniges said although such decisions were typically made by the states and territories, “we need to always take the expert call on health … regarding that”.
“Some states and territories have thought very long and hard about their planning,” she said.
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