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Four new cases of COVID-19 have been confirmed – three are locally transmitted cases while there is one border quarantine case.
Permanent Secretary for Health, Doctor James Fong says the first case is another border quarantine case that had travelled with a border quarantine case announced earlier. One is a 47-year-old nurse at the Raiwaqa Health Centre.
She was swabbed after she reported a slight cough.
After her positive result registered today, the Health Ministry immediately closed the Raiwaqa Health Centre to the public.
Doctor Fong says a contact tracing investigation has been launched, all relevant personnel and patients are being quarantined. The nurse’s household contacts have also been swabbed.
Her 51-year-old husband has also tested positive for COVID-19. He is also a focus of a contact tracing investigation.
The Permanent Secretary says they only identified these two cases late this afternoon, and they do not yet have a clear link of transmission for either case.
The other local case is a 25-year-old nurse working within Lautoka Hospital.
Doctor Fong says this nurse is already in the Lautoka Hospital since last night along with the rest of the hospital’s personnel and patients.
He says after her positive test results, she has been entered into isolation. Investigations are ongoing into how she might have caught the virus. Doctor Fong also says the testing has ruled out a breach of the Lautoka Hospital Isolation Ward after all staff returned negative COVID-19 test results.
He says this is a reassuring affirmation of the operational protocols for their COVID Isolation Ward which must be maintained as the most secure facilities in the country.
However, this news also indicates that the community is the most likely source of the Lautoka Hospital outbreak.
He says in the early phase of their containment strategy, they hoped to break the early chains of transmission quickly by tracing and testing primary and secondary contacts of existing cases.
Doctor Fong says they have always screened carefully for symptomatic cases among the community as well, however, this surge in cases of unknown origin demands that they develop much stronger mechanisms of community surveillance.
He says as their testing capacity steadily increases, they are going to become even more judicious in their testing of all Fijians with COVID-like symptoms, regardless of their connection to existing patients.
But Doctor Fong says the thing about community surveillance is that it requires the community.
He says it requires that all of us are fully invested in the containment of the virus.
The Permanent Secretary says screening clinics can be opened, but it takes the initiative of an ill patient to come forward for the ministry to find them.
