Detectives battle to solve baffling COVID-19 clues

Somewhere in the case files and contact data being pored over by Queensland’s COVID detectives is the missing link between a an infection breach and the outbreak that forced a lockdown.

Queensland Chief Health Officer Jeannette Young in Brisbane on Monday. Picture: Getty Images

Somewhere in the case files and contact data being pored over by Queensland’s COVID detectives is the missing link between a weeks-old infection breach and the outbreak that forced the ­nation’s third largest city back into lockdown.

The timing couldn’t be worse for the Sunshine State, just days out from Easter and school holidays when its battered tourism ­industry was set to regain some of its lost lustre.

Once again the virus seemed to have been contained, only to reappear and wreak havoc. In this case, the transmission chain runs through a four-star hotel on the fringe of the Brisbane CBD used to quarantine returned overseas travellers, the city’s second-­biggest hospital and a doctor who tested positive to the hyper-­infectious UK strain 18 days ago.

Unpacking how the virus ­continued to bubble in the community, below the threshold of detection in that crucial window between Friday, March 12, and last Monday, March 22, when a 26-year-old Stafford landscaper began to feel unwell, will be critical to whether Brisbane can ­reopen in time for Easter.

Genomic sequencing showed a link between the infected man and the female PA Hospital doctor who had not been vaccinated when she picked up the virus, evidently from a “superspreader” patient in quarantine at the Grand Chancellor Hotel in inner-city Spring Hill.

At the time, Queensland Health said the doctor was believed to have been infectious for only one day while out and about. Unlike in January, when the UK strain was first detected among returned travellers at the Grand Chancellor, forcing a three-day lockdown of the city, Premier ­Annastacia Palaszczuk shied away from lowering the boom again, arguing the doctor had not spent long enough in the community to warrant this.

So how did the virus jump from her to the landscaper who lived and worked on the opposite side of Brisbane River? Queensland Chief Health Officer Jeannette Young said “one of those missing links” was likely the young man’s brother who had been exposed to the virus, but probably was asymptomatic. The telltale was the presence in his system of antibodies to COVID, although the absence of a live virus meant standard genomic ­sequencing could not be conducted, Dr Young explained.

“We will continue to test him to see if we can work out what has happened,” she said.

The dilemma for Queensland Health, scrambling to catch up, is that each new case throws up multiple potential infection sites and dozens of additional contacts to be tracked down and assessed.

The landscaper presented for testing last Thursday, March 25, but thankfully had stayed home from work after coming down with flu-like symptoms three days earlier. On the current count, the cluster numbers seven confirmed community-acquired cases: the landscaper and his brother; the landscaper’s friend from Strathpine, Lachlan Simpson, who was wrongly accused of throwing a party while contagious; two of Mr Simpson’s workmates; and most baffling of all, a nurse who worked in a COVID ward at PA Hospital who in turn infected her sister.

Unaware they were contagious, the women travelled to the northern NSW holiday centre of Byron Bay over the weekend for a bachelorette party and attended a number of packed venues. NSW contact tracers are now on the job.

Dr Young, however, said she was not convinced the nurse had been exposed in the hospital as she had been on leave during the likely incubation period, which also explained why she had not been vaccinated.

In addition, housemates of the landscaper and Mr Simpson were in hotel quarantine and had to date tested negative to the virus. But it will be another week before they can all be cleared.

To complicate matters further, one of Mr Simpson’s infected colleagues, with whom he also flatted, spent three days in Gladstone on the Queensland coast, widening the net for contact tracers.

“I didn’t sleep last night, I am very worried, very concerned,” a grim-faced Ms Palaszczuk said on Monday, announcing the three-day lockdown of greater Brisbane’s 2.6 million residents.

Warning that the state now had “significant” community transmission of the UK variant, which is up to 50 per cent more ­infectious, Dr Young said: “This is happening very, very quickly. It is evolving.”

The stark language was in contrast to earlier assurances that the outbreak was in hand. Only on Sunday, Dr Young was downplaying the need for another lockdown of the state capital, saying: “I cannot rule anything out, but I am very hopeful.”

The emergence of four new cases on Monday changed that.

Additional reporting: Mackenzie Scott