Hunt on for fans of city’s orchestra after woman tests positive for coronavirus

Authorities are tracking an audience from a weekend Perth orchestral performance in the latest virus scare as the death toll rose to three.

A second resident of Dorothy Henderson Lodge aged care facility in Sydney’s northwest has died after contracting coronavirus. Picture: Gaye Gerard

Authorities are tracking an audience from a weekend Perth orchestral performance in the latest coronavirus scare as the death toll rose to three on Sunday and federal officials moved to allow doctors to consult patients by phone to protect them from infection.

NSW Health confirmed another two cases of the virus on Sunday night, bringing the total number of cases in the state to 40. The number of ­diagnosed cases nationwide hit 81, including two Australian ­Defence Force personnel who travelled from Sydney to Canberra on February 28 and spent time at ­Defence headquarters.

An 82-year-old Sydney man was confirmed as the country’s latest COVID-19 fatality. He was the second resident of the BaptistCare Dorothy Henderson Lodge Aged Care Centre in the northwestern Sydney suburb of Macquarie Park to die after contracting the virus.

The nursing home has been in lockdown for the past week after a mass walkout by staff who feared they would become infected and expose their families to the virus.

Emeritus Professor of Public Health and Community Medicine at the University of Sydney, Stephen Leeder, said “serious inadequacies” in Australia’s aged-care homes had only been exacerbated by the coronavirus.

He said while aged-care residents were the most vulnerable group, nursing homes were staffed almost entirely by “part-time people who come from the Pacific”, often with no training in infection control. Without them, he said, the system would “collapse completely”.

As panic buying of consumer staples continued, supermarket giant Coles placed further limits on the amount of toilet paper purchases, announcing on Sunday that shoppers could now buy only one pack per transaction.

The move came as NSW Police laid charges and urged calm after two women were charged with affray on Sunday after footage emerged of a group brawling over toilet rolls at Woolworths Chullora in the city’s southwest on Saturday morning.

Health Minister Greg Hunt said all Australians with flu-like symptoms should get tested for the virus, overturning previous ­advice suggesting only those ­returning from overseas be tested.

Mr Hunt announced the government had acquired 54 million medical masks for health professionals that would arrive in April. Another 260,000 masks were being made available for distribution before that.

In NSW one of the new cases, a male in his 70s, who had not travelled overseas, attended St Vincent’s Emergency Department on Friday. St Vincent’s Hospital is in the process of contacting patients who may have come in contact with him. The second case was a man in his 40s who had travelled overseas recently.

Victorian health officials confirmed another case of coronavirus — the state’s 12th — with a woman in her 50s visiting from Jakarta. The woman had arrived in Melbourne from Perth on Virgin Airlines flight VA682 last Monday.

In Western Australian a woman tested positive after attending a performance of the state’s symphony orchestra. The woman, in her 70s, developed flu-like symptoms after returning to her home in Perth’s western suburbs from a visit to Cuba and London.

WA Chief Health Officer ­Andrew Robertson said the incident showed how important it was for anyone who had travelled overseas and who was showing symptoms of the virus to self-isolate. “If they’re being tested, don’t go to events or to restaurants,” he said.  The Health Department was working on Sunday to track down the people who may have sat near the woman during Saturday night’s concert.

The state will now change its procedures in the wake of the latest diagnoses.

Now, anyone who has returned from overseas and shown symptoms of the virus will be required to self-isolate until they know the results of their test regardless of where they had come from.

Theresa Kwan, the wife of James Kwan who died from coronavirus a week ago, has returned to health and left hospital.

Their son Edwin, who had also contracted the virus while the family was aboard the Diamond Princess cruise ship, has also recovered and recently returned to Australia from Japan.

Meanwhile, a leading public health expert has warned more drastic and “unusual’ steps needed to be taken in anticipation of a “worst case scenario” as the number of COVID-19 infections continued to ramp up.

Emeritus professor John Dwyer —- who was the face of Australia’s highly successful HIV/AIDS public health — said minimising the spread of the virus was a responsibility that needed to be borne by the entire community.

He said one critical option that could be part of the government’s $1bn response plan was compensation payments for Australia’s three million casual workers, many of whom could be forced to stay at home for weeks, without pay, whether they were infected or simply at risk of infection.

“We are asking them to stay away for a whole-of-community benefit and it is going to be very difficult for some people who live from pay cheque to pay cheque,’ he said. Professor Dwyer said younger Australians probably felt reassured that at least 80 per cent of people infected with the virus were likely to experience only relatively mild symptoms. Politicians should be looking at an emergency social service payment to compensate people caught in this situation.”

But he said with mortality rates for people over 70 running at about 15 per cent — or one person in six — all Australians needed to be vigilant and ensure they didn’t infect others.