Health News at Your Fingertips

For those in NSW, a new venue of concern has been released by NSW Health.

It follows health authorities moving away from listing every exposure site in the state, and focusing on specific ones in locations of concern.

I’m just about to finish up for the day!

But before I leave you in the extremely capable hands of my colleague, Elias Visontay, let’s take a look back at today’s biggest headlines:

• ACT reported 13 new Covid-19 cases, all linked. Eight were in quarantine for their infectious period, while five were infectious in the community.

• Queensland recorded one case of community transmission, linked to the Indooroopilly cluster, who was in isolation for their entire infectious period.

• Western Australia and South Australia both recorded zero new locally acquired Covid-19 cases. But SA now has 14 exposure sites, after two truck drivers from NSW travelled through the state before testing positive for Covid-19 in WA yesterday.

• Meanwhile, New Zealand reported 83 new cases, all but one in Auckland. This brings the country’s total to 511 cases since the Delta outbreak was first identified on 17 August. Prime minister Jacinda Ardern warned that Auckland was likely to be in lockdown for at least another fortnight, if not longer.

We are seeing pictures of a small anti-lockdown protest that took place at the Queensland-NSW border this morning.

Queensland Police said they had a relatively small crowd of a maximum of 100 protesters, which gathered steam at midday and ran for around an hour. They said that a joint operation between Queensland and NSW.

Police effectively prevented the protestors from gathering together in large numbers.

Three people were arrested in Coolangatta, Queensland. Of them, a 39-year-old male was charged with serious assault and obstruct police.

All three were involved in last week’s anti-lockdown border protests, and were all persons of interest, Queensland police said.

Further to my last post about South Australian exposure sites, the state’s chief public health officer Professor Nicola Spurrier added that she was concerned that not enough people have been using QR codes to check into shops and venues.

She said only three people had used QR codes to check in at exposure sites at the same time that the truck drivers were there.

She said that there were 16 people who had used but failed to check in at Port Augusta OTR petrol station within the same time window that the two truck drivers attended.

“That is a concern for us because we have not been able to contact them, require the testing and have them in quarantine, and it’s concerning for those individuals themselves but also their families and anyone else they may come into contact with,” Spurrier said.

South Australia hasn’t recorded any new Covid-19 cases, but it has announced 14 new tier-1 exposure sites.

Why? Remember how I mentioned earlier that two truck drivers from New South Wales had tested positive after arriving in Western Australia? They travelled through South Australia.

South Australian chief public health officer Nicola Spurrier said that both drivers were getting daily Covid-19 tests, as is required for freight drivers coming from NSW, and were wearing masks.

But she added that authorities were concerned that one driver could have been infectious as early as 21 August, three days before his test.

We’re very hopeful he would have had a very low infectiousness at that stage, but as an abundance of caution we’ve put up those exposure sites.

Thank you so much to my colleague Elias Visontay.

It’s Justine Landis-Hanley here again, to bring you this afternoon’s news.