Covid 19 coronavirus: ‘Luck cannot be trusted’ – Papatoetoe High final students contacted as 1000 Kmart shoppers isolate

After resorting to knocking on doors, last night’s contact trackers only had one student from Papatoetoe High School to track and test for Covid-19.

The 10-day delay in reaching the last handful of students has been called “frustrating” by Covid-19 Minister Chris Hipkins.

Last week, contact trackers called the students, their families, and texted and emailed them in an attempt to reach everyone and make sure they took tests after the Valentine’s Day outbreak in the city. school.

By the end of the week, more than 98 percent of Papatoetoe High School students and staff had been contacted and screened.

But authorities struggled to locate a small number and began knocking on doors Monday. Last night it was understood that it was due to a single student who had not been evaluated.

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One of the students who could not be located happened to test positive Tuesday. Later that day, two of the student’s siblings also tested positive.

One of those new cases worked two shifts at Kmart Botany, folding clothes, greeting people at the entrance and manning the click-and-collect counter on the nights of February 19 and 20.

The 300 store employees are considered close contacts and have been told to isolate themselves and get tested, while the 870 shoppers identified as present during the teen shifts are “more casual.”

They have also been told to stay home for the full 14 days and have two tests done because they have to be “especially cautious.”

Yesterday no new community cases were added to the Valentine’s Day group of 11 members.

Chief Health Officer Dr. Ashley Bloomfield said one of the reasons some of the students didn’t get screened earlier could have been that they faced barriers like relying on a family member to get to a center of tests.

The Auckland Regional Public Health Service said that in the event that someone could not be reached, other factors, such as not having a working phone, not speaking English or personal circumstances, could be at play.

Bloomfield said the key was to make sure the students were isolated because they couldn’t return to school without a negative result.

“You can’t rely on luck with this virus. That’s why we had the protocol of not going back to school unless they had a negative test and that turned out to be exactly the right thing to do.”

Lead epidemiologist Michael Baker says being able to contact and assess 98 percent of the 1,500 students and 150 staff members at the school in one week was an example of the system “working well.”

“It could be troublesome, it took time to get to those last students … but it’s hard to say [the contact tracing system] it performed poorly under the circumstances, ”said the University of Otago professor.

Baker said that “most of the time” contacting close contacts in most cases was “good enough” and his overall impression of the Papatoetoe High School outbreak was that the contact tracing system was working well, especially given the lots of casual and casual contacts plus needed to come.

Responsibility fell to the Auckland Regional Public Health Service, but resources from the national contact tracing system were brought in to help.

The “gold standard” of contact tracing identified in Dr. Ayesha Verrall’s report last year is to find 80 percent of a case’s contacts in three days.

Hipkins said they trusted people to “do the right thing” when asked how they ensured compliance outside of the daily phone call symptom check.

“You are being asked to isolate yourself for a reason and we need people to follow the rules.”

He has not received advice on whether other measures are needed to ensure that people follow the order.

All individuals who are told to isolate themselves but cannot work from home are eligible for the Covid-19 Leave Support Scheme Plan additional salary payment of $ 585.50.

With so many people being ordered to stay home, the government said it was “watching the situation closely” as to whether they needed to expand support.

“Each individual case will be different and some people may need more support than others,” said Social Development Minister Carmel Sepuloni.

Everyone at Papatoetoe High will now need a second negative test before going back to school. More than 600 students and staff were screened Monday and another 328 had been screened as of 1 pm yesterday.

Remote learning was offered to students who missed their second week of school.

Genomic sequencing confirmed that the latest cases were related to the three reported on Valentine’s Day.

But how the last schoolgirl got infected is an enigma: she barely knows the other students and is not in their classes.

One of the lines of investigation is whether you contracted the virus through airborne particles in a hallway or bathroom.

Bloomfield said it was a curious nature of the new UK variant that most of the close contacts of the cases had not been infected, but others with fleeting interactions had.

The new strain also appears to present with different symptoms, such as muscle aches, lethargy, and loss of smell, rather than those similar to a cold like the previous variants.

He urged the kiwis not to discount sore muscles and mistake the symptom for pain after exercise.

Both Hipkins and Bloomfield said they were still confident of having Auckland at alert level 1, but if more cases emerged without a clear route of transmission, that could spell change.

“[The] The news of additional cases that I know was unsettling and feels like another climb on our roller coaster. But it doesn’t have to be alarming. I’m sure the system is working as it should. “

Meanwhile, the 1,000th kiwi got its vaccine yesterday as the rollout continues through border workers in managed isolation facilities.

When the broader vaccination campaign is scheduled to reach the general population, Bloomfield said he would be among community leaders to publicly receive the vaccine.