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Health minister Brad Hazzard and NSW chief health officer Dr Kerry Chant
NSW chief health officer Dr Kerry Chant, right – alongside the health minister, Brad Hazzard – speaks about the first confirmed person-to-person transmissions of coronavirus in Australia. Photograph: Joel Carrett/AAP
NSW chief health officer Dr Kerry Chant, right – alongside the health minister, Brad Hazzard – speaks about the first confirmed person-to-person transmissions of coronavirus in Australia. Photograph: Joel Carrett/AAP

Coronavirus: first cases of community transmission confirmed in Australia

This article is more than 4 years old

A NSW health worker who has not travelled overseas in three months has been diagnosed with the disease along with a 41-year-old woman

Australia now has 30 patients who have been diagnosed with coronavirus, including the first confirmed cases of community transmission.

On Monday afternoon the New South Wales health minister, Brad Hazzard, said a 41 year-old NSW woman caught the disease and that her case could be traced back to her 43-year-old brother who had returned from Iran.

More concerningly, the minister said a 53-year-old health worker had been diagnosed with the virus.

Hazzard said the infected man had been “working in a healthcare setting” in NSW directly with patients and had not travelled overseas for three months.

“NSW health has begun work to determine what contact there may have been to have given him transmission of the virus,” he said. “We’re taking all the necessary steps to find out how the individual managed to acquire the virus.”

Previously, all people with coronavirus in Australia caught the disease by travelling to an infected country, or through direct contact with a family member who had travelled. Health experts had warned that community spread was inevitable in Australia, especially as countries such as Iran and Italy continue to see a spike in cases.

The NSW chief health officer, Dr Kerry Chant, said anyone who had been in close contact with the man in the past 14 days would be tested and told to isolate themselves. A close contact is someone who has been face to face for at least 15 minutes with someone who has tested positive for the virus, or been in the same closed space for at least two hours without protective gear with the person while infectious.

“Our public health units and infectious disease units will contact all of those individuals and ascertain if they are well,” Chant said. “I haven’t seen a list of all the patients this person has worked with but it would be not surprising that this healthcare worker would have been in contact with people over 65.”

She said importation of cases from Iran had been “significant”, with foreign travellers arriving from Iran banned from entering Australia. “In relation to this healthcare worker, it raises a question: was there a case that was missed?” Chant said. “There is always a possibility there is a case or cases out there we have missed. I am reassured there is not widespread transmission – we have tested over 3,500 people and we continue to see high rates of testing.”

New coronavirus cases in Australia could not be prevented, the country’s chief medical officer, Brendan Murphy, said earlier on Monday as the federal government raised its travel advice to Italy. Travellers have been urged to exercise a high degree of caution across all of Italy, and to reconsider travel to 10 virus-affected towns in the north which have been isolated by the Italian authorities. Any health or aged-care workers returning from Italy or South Korea should not attend work for 14 days, he said.

“As we said, we are in a position where we’re going to expect to see more cases in Australia. We are prepared, and we are preparing for an greater numbers,” Murphy said. “We’ve got lots of preparation underway across the health sector and we are in very good situational preparation. But this is pretty much as we expected.”

The health minister. Greg Hunt, offered his condolences to the family of 78-year-old West Australian man James Kwan, a pioneer in the tourism industry, who along with his 79-year-old wife fell ill on board the Diamond Princess cruise ship. Both were placed in isolation units at Sir Charles Gardiner Hospital. Kwan died on Sunday.

“It was obviously deeply saddening and tragic for the Kwan family but for many others who would have been affected along the way,” Hunt said. The passengers were quarantined on the ship for 14 days, during which time the virus spread. Australia’s evacuees were sent to Howard Springs in the Northern Territory to undergo testing.

Hunt said that although the death was “unfortunate”, older people were more susceptible and that “our response with the Diamond Princess was exemplary”.

“We brought these people home, we have quarantined them and a number of them have developed the disease, whereas they may have been led into the community and infected people on a plane,” he said.

“We have protected the Australian community but anyone who became unwell at Howard Springs in Darwin was given the most high-level Medivac back to their home state, put in the best possible care. I think the Diamond Princess repatriation was an exemplary piece of public health.”

Hunt said the message for Australians was that “it is perfectly safe to go about their daily business and do exactly what they would normally do”.

“With the international spread of this virus, it is almost inevitable that we will see more cases of Covid-19 in Australia in coming weeks.”

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