‘Many hundreds’ on Melbourne Covid-case train

Authorities are scrambling to contact ‘many hundreds’ of people who caught the same train as a 30-year-old man at the centre of Victoria’s latest COVID scare.

Victorian Health Minister Martin Foley. Picture: Getty Images

Authorities are scrambling to contact “many hundreds” of people who caught the same train as a 30-year-old man at the centre of Victoria’s latest COVID scare following Friday night’s AFL clash between Geelong and Richmond.

The contact tracing efforts came as genomic testing matched the case of the man with that of his neighbour in a South Australian quarantine hotel, supporting the hypothesis that he caught the virus in the Adelaide facility after testing negative four times during his fortnight in quarantine.

Late on Tuesday night the Victorian Health Department updated the list of sites in Melbourne’s north, southwest and CBD visited by the man after he returned to his Wollert home on the city’s northern outskirts on May 4.

Added to the list of Tier 2 locations were the train which left the outer northern suburb of Craigieburn for Southern Cross Station at 5.28pm last Friday, May 7, ­arriving at 6.07pm, and the train which left Flinders Street at 10.20pm, arriving at Craigieburn at 11.05pm. Anyone who has visited a Tier 2 location must get tested and isolate until they receive a negative result.

“We are working with both Metro (Trains) through their data and, given that it was in the aftermath of the Richmond-Geelong game, we are working with the AFL to get messages … out to what we would expect to be many hundreds of people on that train,” Health Minister Martin Foley said.

Victorian and South Australian Health authorities on Wednesday revised their advice to passengers who travelled from Adelaide to Melbourne on Jetstar flight JQ771 on Tuesday, May 4, instructing them to get tested and isolate until they receive a negative result. South Australian Chief Health Officer Nicola Spurrier and her Victorian counterpart Brett Sutton on Tuesday said they did not believe Victoria’s latest case had been contagious on board the flight, because he did not develop symptoms until Saturday.

But on Wednesday, both states updated their advice to take into account the small possibility that the man could have contracted the virus on the plane, and not from his neighbour in the quarantine hotel who tested positive for the virus the same day.

That possibility has now been all but eliminated by the genomic sequencing showing a match with the Adelaide hotel case, although the request for flight passengers to isolate until they receive a negative result remains in place.

Victorian health authorities processed 21,461 tests on Tuesday. That compared with 12,918 on Monday. Mr Foley said a significant number of people at the Curry Vault restaurant in Melbourne’s CBD, which was visited by the infected man on Friday between 6.30pm and 9.30pm, had failed to check in using the Health Department’s QR code system.

“Our teams are working through the QR codes, financial transactions, the takeaway transactions of that facility, just to make sure that we run down anyone that might have been associated with that facility, and we want to thank those people who’ve come forward without having to be contacted, as a result of the media around this issue yesterday,” Mr Foley said.

“The challenges at that site, frankly, were that the QR code, whilst it was in place, wasn’t ­widely taken up. “This is a reminder that the quality and the speed of the public health response is directly linked to the record-keeping that operators and customers use.”