Covid 19 coronavirus: two new cases today, including a health worker at the Jet Park quarantine facility

Prevention measures and the use of PPE at the Jet Park Hotel are being reviewed after a worker tested positive, the first case in the five and a half months that the quarantine facility has been operating.

The worker was one of two new cases of Covid-19 reported today by the Ministry of Health. The other is an imported case in managed isolation.

The worker is a healthcare worker who tested negative last week, but tested positive this week in the first week of routine weekly testing of Jet Park workers.

Air Commodore Darryn Webb said the worker was examined Friday morning and that the health worker did not work anywhere other than Jet Park.

The MIQ team is now reviewing personnel records, swipe card data, and CCTV footage to map the person’s movements in recent days.

Five household contacts connected to the health worker are isolated in their home and are being tested today.

“This case is still being investigated to determine whether the infection came from the community or the quarantine facility, although at this stage no obvious links to other cases in the community have been established,” the ministry said.

Sequencing of the health worker’s Covid-19 genome is underway and results are expected tomorrow.

The protocols and procedures are now being reviewed twice at the facility, where there is an increased risk of infection.

“Personnel at the facility who were considered close contacts have been removed and a thorough cleaning of staff areas at the facility has been completed,” the ministry said.

“All personnel at the quarantine facility are being retested over the next 48 hours. That process started last night with 48 staff members screened and more are being tested today.”

Webb said the rest would be tested by the end of tomorrow.

“Any identified close contacts will be required to be isolated and tested,” Webb said.

“Hospital grade cleaning of the medical and operational staff rooms has been done using a Bioquell machine, which disinfects with hydrogen peroxide vapor,” Webb said.

The returnee in managed isolation arrived from South Africa on September 8 and remains in quarantine in Canterbury.

There are 33 cases in the Mt Roskill Evangelical Fellowship Church group and 15 cases in the bereavement events subgroup; 98 percent of the church congregation has now been tested, as have 98 percent of those who attend mourning events.

There are three people in the hospital with Covid-19 – one is isolated in a ward of Auckland City hospital. Two are in the ICU, North Shore and Waikato hospitals.
The number of active cases is now 97.

Of these, 39 are imported cases at MIQ facilities and 58 are community cases.

7,211 tests were processed yesterday.

With one day until the Cabinet decides whether to ease the alert level restrictions, the ministry provided an update on the case numbers just after 1:00 p.m.

And Health Director General Ashley Bloomfield and Pacific Peoples Ministry Executive Director Laulu Mac Leauanae answered questions from viewers on Facebook.

Despite the growing group of Mt Roskill churches, Leauanae said in the Facebook Live session that Pacific church communities had responded with “pace and speed.”

There was initially some reluctance in the group to cooperate with health officials, and Leauanae said there was much more clarity on what contact tracing, testing, and social distancing meant in the second week of the current outbreak.

Bloomfield tried to address the misinformation by saying that Covid-19 was 10 times more dangerous than normal flu, and cited the death of Dr. Joe Williams as an example of how serious it is.

He said New Zealand would have seen thousands of deaths, including 20 percent among healthcare workers, if New Zealand had failed to eradicate the virus like other countries.

Leauanae asked people not to share information from sources outside the ministry.

Bloomfield added that church services were particularly contagious events because they were often held indoors, with large gatherings, and where people often sang. Covid-19 is transmitted through air droplets, and singing is an activity that has been shown to spread it more easily.

The cabinet will review tomorrow the situation of the alert level of Covid-19, and the changes will be made from Wednesday at 11:59 p.m.

This morning, Newshub reported that two staff members of the Waitematā District Board of Health had tested positive.

One had been on leave before becoming infected and has not returned to DHB since. The other has been out of work since the end of August and is part of a small, non-patient team whose members have tested negative.

Yesterday, the ministry reported two new cases of Covid-19: two girls between 10 and 14 years old.

One of the new cases is a student from Sunnyvale School in West Auckland, which will open tomorrow despite the positive case.

The Sunnyvale School student did not go to school while infected and the Auckland Regional Public Health Service has not identified any close contacts.

The school is considered safe to attend, however it will be thoroughly cleaned as a precautionary measure, parents, caregivers and staff were informed via Facebook.

The cases are associated with the bereavement events subgroup, which is linked to the Mt Roskill Evangelical Fellowship Church group.

All members of the church congregation were asked to retest, and as of yesterday 98% of them had done so.

The group is part of the larger Auckland group, which yesterday grew to 176, 69 of whom were still active; 47 of them and some family members are in quarantine at the Jet Park Hotel.

It comes after a protest yesterday against government restrictions, with a few thousand people in central Auckland. It was organized by Advanced Party co-leaders Jami-Lee Ross and Billy Te Kahika.

There was little social distancing and few masks during the event.