Coronavirus: NSW Health scrambles to contact patients treated by infected doctor, fears for childcare staff, children

Two doctors with coronavirus attended a radiology conference with 70 colleagues; a baby has been diagnosed in SA.

Health authorities in NSW are tracing more than 70 doctors who attended a radiology seminar on February 18 also attended by two doctors who have tested positive for coronavirus

One of the doctors was an emergency department registrar working at Liverpool Hospital. Her colleagues are now in isolation with NSW Health scrambling to contact the patients she treated.

The female doctor is the second physician working in a hospital in Sydney who has been diagnosed with COVID-19 as human-to-human transmission in NSW gathers pace and the state fights what Health Minister Brad Hazzard is now describing as a “war against coronavirus”.

NSW chief health officer Kerry Chant said colleagues of the doctor have also be placed into isolation.

Mr Hazzard said it was clear that NSW was moving into a dangerous phase of the virus spreading more widely, with cases emerging that have no links with overseas travel, and everyone in the community must now be vigilant.

“Members of the community really have to do everything they can to fight what really has become a war with this virus,” Mr Hazzard said.

Health authorities have also moved to set up an emergency clinic for children from a Sydney childcare centre amid revelations that a group of young children from the centre visited the northwest Sydney aged care facility at the centre of a coronavirus outbreak.

A 95-year-old woman living at the centre, the Dorothy Henderson Lodge at Macquarie Park, died of the virus, with an 82-year old man, a woman in her 70s and an aged care worker also infected.

The Macquarie Park childcare centre that has been closed.

Health minister Brad Hazzard said children attending the Banksia Childcare Centre on the campus of Macquarie University had visited the nearby Dorothy Henderson Lodge on February 24.

NSW chief health officer Kerry Chant said there was now a statewide ban on children from childcare centres visiting aged care centres. “We are advising that these visits of groups of children and children from childcare centres is curtailed at this time,” Dr Chant said.

All visitors to the Dorothy Henderson Lodge have been banned and residents are isolated in their rooms. Meals are being delivered to rooms with the emergency nursing workforce who have been called in to work at the lodge wearing head-to-toe personal protective wear, masks and goggles.

Baby diagnosed with coronavirus

South Australia’s Premier Steven Marshall has confirmed a baby has been diagnosed with coronavirus in the state.

The eight-month-old baby and its mother are being cared for in the Flinders Medical Centre and are in a stable condition.

The baby’s mother was diagnosed with COVID-19 on Wednesday after returning from Iran.

Brisbane Mater Hospital staff in quarantine

Two new cases of coronavirus in Queensland have alarmed authorities because neither of the victims travelled to known coronavirus hotspots.

A 29-year-old Brisbane woman who had recently travelled from London to Brisbane with a short stopover in Singapore tested positive for COVID-19 on Thursday.

The woman is “well and isolated”, according to Queensland Health.

An 81-year-old was also in a stable condition at the Sunshine Coast University Hospital after returning from a trip to Thailand.

Contact tracing is underway for both cases.

Travel advisories for coronavirus are mostly focused on China, Iran and Italy, and to a lesser extent Japan, Italy and Mongolia.

Ten staff from Brisbane’s Mater Hospital have gone into isolation after coming in contact with the University of Queensland student who tested positive coronavirus this week.

A spokeswoman from the hospital confirmed the staff members had gone into isolation but did not reveal which positions they were employed in.

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 Toowong where he lived with a housemate.

He is not believed to have attended lectures or set foot on campus while he was ill.

The student attended the Mater Hospital’s emergency department on Monday where he was tested for the virus before being sent home.

When the results were confirmed, he was taken to the Royal Brisbane Women’s Hospital.

The student’s housemate was also tested for the virus but results released on Wednesday night were negative.

He will spend two weeks in quarantine in his own home.

Meanwhile, authorities scrambling to track down people who had contact with a coronavirus infected man who arrived in Brisbane on Emirates flight EK430 from Iran last week.

Passengers seated in the two rows in front of and behind the man will be asked to go into isolation by Queensland Health.

The 26-year-old Logan man tested positive for the virus on Wednesday and is in isolation at Princess Alexandra Hospital.

Thirteen people in Queensland have tested positive for the virus, including three passengers from the Diamond Princess cruise ship which was quarantined in Japan.

Sydney law firm evacuated

About 600 staff from top law firm Clayton Utz were ordered to leave their Sydney city office building on Thursday and work from home, after it emerged that a chef who works for the law firm was linked to the 95-year-old woman who died of COVID-19.

Clayton Utz headquarters are housed at 1 Bligh Street in Sydney’s CBD.

The chef is married to the granddaughter of the elderly victim. She is being tested for coronavirus with results expected late Thursday evening.

The law firm said if the result is negative, the chef will not require testing and all staff from the firm will return to work tomorrow.

“One of our Sydney employees notified us overnight that he may indirectly have been exposed to the virus,’’ Clayton Utz head of corporate affairs Lauren Scott said.

“He immediately self-isolated and we have taken a range of precautionary measures including asking our Sydney employees to work from home, and suspending an on-site client event. We will be updating our employees and clients once we know more this evening. Their health and safety is our priority which is why we’ve been pro-active in managing any potential risk.”

Nursing home at centre of outbreak

The 95-year-old nursing home resident became the second person to die from coronavirus in Australia, with six more cases confirmed in NSW.

The woman was a resident at the Dorothy Henderson Lodge nursing home at Macquarie Park in Sydney’s north-west, where a 50-year-old worker who cared for her was diagnosed with the virus earlier this week, NSW Health confirmed in a statement late on Wednesday. The woman died in hospital on Tuesday.

The employee had worked with 13 residents at the nursing home. An 82-year-old male resident is also being treated in hospital for the virus, while a third resident aged in her 70s was diagnosed on Wednesday.

As fears over the virus becoming an epidemic, Vodafone has become the latest Australian company to send staff home. The telco on Wednesday evacuated its head office in North Sydney after a staff member began showing “flu-like symptoms”. The staff member had recently returned from Japan and went back to work earlier this week, a Vodafone spokesperson said. “The staff member visited a doctor and was tested yesterday so it is just a matter of waiting for those results,” the spokesperson said.

The rise in cases bring the number of positive infections in NSW to 22 and the national count to 52. The first Australian to die was 78-year-old West Australian man James Kwan, 78, who passed away from the virus on Sunday after being evacuated from the Diamond Princess.

Northern Territory Health said in a statement that a 52-year-old man tested positive to COVID-19 on Wednesday night, in the first case of coronavirus for the territory. The tourist flew to Darwin from Sydney and is being treated at the Royal Darwin Hospital in isolation.

The new cases in NSW overnight include the female doctor who works at Liverpool Hospital, a female patient from the Northern Beaches, a male from Cronulla and a female who is believed to have returned from the Philippines, NSW Health said.

Dr Chant passed on her sympathy to the family of the 95-year-old resident of the Dorothy Henderson Lodge.

Dr Chant said the female doctor who was diagnosed on March 4 had no history of overseas travel. “We are immediately establishing which staff and patients may need to self-isolate and be tested for COVID-19 should they be unwell,” she said.

The woman who is believed to have travelled from the Philippines is aged in her 60s and arrived back in Australia on March 3. “Her travel details are being obtained and will be disclosed if she posed a risk to any other passengers on her flight,” NSW Health said.

It is feared that an infected doctor, who worked at Ryde Hospital and who is now under quarantine, may have spread COVID-19 to his patients. Dr Chant confirmed 40 Ryde Hospital medical staff had been ordered to isolate themselves for 14 days and were investigating how the 53-year-old doctor contracted the virus. The isolated staff include 13 doctors, 23 nurses and four other health workers.

Plans for increased outbreak activated

Person-to-person transmission of COVID-19 has happened much sooner than expected in Australia, forcing health authorities to bring forward preparations for a mass outbreak.

The emergence of the homegrown cases in NSW, six weeks ahead of forecasts, means the states must recast their models on the likely spread of the virus.

Queensland Chief Health Officer Jeannette Young confirmed that the state’s contingency planning assumed that at least 25 per cent of the population would be infected in the “first wave”.

“The original modelling suggested strongly that we would not see community transmission in Queensland until the end of April, early May, but now we have seen it in NSW that brings that forward,” she told The Australian. “We will see it earlier than that.”

Dr Young said hospitals had been readied for an influx of the sick with many setting aside space for “fever clinics” to treat COVID-19 patients.

People would be urged to self-isolate at home if they developed the flu-like symptoms associated with early-stage coronavirus, and be tested at their local GP clinic or by dedicated “home hospital” staff who would come to them.

Queensland Chief Health Officer Dr Jeannette Young.

If they were found to have the virus, only then would they access the emergency medical infrastructure now being fast-tracked.

Patients attending hospital fever clinics — separate to existing emergency departments and wards — would be kept at a physical distance from each other before being seen. “We won’t have a situation where they are sitting around together in waiting rooms,” Dr Young said.

The infection rate in Australia was likely to be lower than that in China, she said. There, the basic reproduction value or R0 of the virus was 2.5 — representing the average number of people who caught it from a single infected person.

“You have got to remember that 80 per cent plus of cases are mild, and a lot of those people will scarcely know they have it, so they can be managed at home very, very safely with no problem,” Dr Young said. “Because … we have planned, we have got everything in place, we will be able to do much, much better than China. They were in the middle of it before they even knew they had it.’’

But health services were scrambling to recalibrate modelling of the virus’s likely path after the jump to person-to-person transmission. “That information has changed overnight … we really don’t know the full clinical picture. We have all seen what happened in Italy,” Dr Young warned, referring to the outbreak in the country’s north that has struck down more than 2200 people, killing 79 to date.

“And Italy has a very good health system. They went from no cases to a massive number over a very short period, so that could happen anywhere in the world.”

Queensland has reported 11 of the nation’s 41 known COVID-19 cases after a 26-year-old man from Logan, south of Brisbane, was confirmed on Wednesday to have the virus. He had recently returned from Iran.

Asked whether person-to-person transmission represented a game-changer in terms of the public health response, Queensland Health Minister Steven Miles said: “It could be. It will depend on how effective they are in containing it (in NSW).”

Dr Young said the worrying development was raised on Wednesday in a telephone hook-up of the Australian Health Protection Principal Committee comprising state and territories’ chief health officers, chaired by Australian Chief Medical Officer Brendan Murphy.

“But I don’t think it matters,” she said. “In Queensland, we are prepared for whenever it arrives on our shores. Hospitals and health services … have got it all under control, they know exactly what they’re doing.

“And the same for the country. Every state and territory is standing up, ready to respond. We knew it was going to happen at some point of time. We were never sure about when, because it depends on so many ­factors.”