Three members of the same family have been diagnosed with COVID-19 and hundreds of people potentially exposed in a new SA coronavirus cluster.
A medi-hotel worker has been identified as one of those infected in SA’s most serious COVID-19 cluster to date.
Two other family members are already infected, others are displaying symptoms and hundreds of people have potentially been exposed in the northern suburbs.
Chief public health officer Professor Nicola Spurrier said detailed contact tracing began on Sunday after she received the positive lab results for the first patient, a woman in her 80s, at 12.30am.
She said the cluster was already considered more dangerous than the Thebarton outbreak earlier this year, because it involved multiple public venues.
Shoppers who visited the Parafield Plaza Supermarket between 10.30am and 11.30am on Thursday have been told to present for a COVID-19 test, as they were potentially exposed. The woman had visited the shopping centre that day while likely infectious.
The new cluster occurs just as the state is preparing to open borders with Victoria.
Of the 522 cases previously identified in SA, only nine have been locally acquired and the last of those was on April 15.
The source of the new infection is not confirmed and authorities are engaging in urgent contact-tracing.
The woman in her 80s was tested at the Lyell McEwin Hospital emergency department on Saturday morning. She was wearing a mask at the hospital but 90 people – staff and patients – there at the time will be ordered to quarantine.
Since then, two other family members have been confirmed positive – a female in her 50s and a man in his 60s.
They are a child of the woman in her 80s, and the child’s partner – one of whom has worked in a medi-hotel holding quarantined patients.
Professor Spurrier said the new cases were “very troubling”, and the patients had a very large family with many close family contacts, some of whom were already showing symptoms and awaiting the results of tests.
She said it was vital that any South Australians with COVID-19 symptoms immediately presented for a test to avoid the cluster developing further.
“This is exactly when we need people with symptoms to be tested,’’ she said.
The woman in her 80s has been admitted to the Royal Adelaide Hospital and is in a stable condition.
A fourth new case today, a man in his 30s, is a returned overseas traveller who was diagnosed in hotel quarantine.
Professor Spurrier said the Victorian border opening next month was not yet under review and neither were crowd number caps in SA.
On Saturday there were three new cases identified but all were people returning from overseas, who had been placed in immediate quarantine.
They were two women in their 20s, and a woman in her 50s, all tested in hotel quarantine.
The local case announced on Sunday may jeopardise the planned border opening on December 1, when people travelling from Victoria to SA will no longer need to quarantine for 14 days.
On November 1, Australia successfully recorded its first day with zero locally acquired coronavirus cases in almost five months.
The surge in cases had been mainly due to the original large outbreak in Sydney and Victoria’s “second wave” infections.
Meanwhile, SA’s elite team of coronavirus detectives will be significantly boosted and contact-tracing systems overhauled as authorities plan for the COVID-19 pandemic to last “for months, if not years”.
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2020-11-15 05:46:15Z
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