FNQ ON COVID ALERT
A YOUNG Mareeba woman who travelled from Victoria to Queensland before testing positive to the Delta variant of Covid-19 is expected to be investigated by police.
The woman in her 20s attended the Young and Jackson Hotel in Victoria on July 10, identified four days later as a Covid-19 exposure site.
The woman is now in quarantine at one of the five hospitals with a dedicated Covid-19 unit after receiving a positive test result late Monday, despite a previous negative result.
A MAREEBA woman in her 20s who travelled from Victoria to Queensland before testing positive to the Delta variant of Covid-19 is expected to be investigated by police.
The woman attended the Young and Jackson Hotel in Victoria on July 10, identified four days later as a Covid-19 exposure site.
Queensland chief health officer Jeannette Young said the student travelled from Melbourne to Maroochydore, on the Sunshine Coast, transiting through Brisbane, on July 13.
She received an SMS from Victorian health authorities two days later “because she had been at the Young and Jackson pub” at the same time as a known case of SARSCoV-2, the virus that causes Covid-19.
The woman “immediately” got tested for Covid-19 and returned a negative test the following day.
She is now in quarantine at one of the five hospitals with a dedicated Covid-19 unit after receiving a positive test result late Monday, despite the previous negative result.
Mareeba residents have taken to social media to express their outrage over the woman flying from Melbourne to the Sunshine Coast on July 13 and then on to Cairns and the Atherton Tablelands on July 16, instead of first isolating after receiving the text message from the Victorian Health Department.
Under Queensland’s public health directions, she should have gone into quarantine as soon as she received the SMS, filled in an online contact tracing form and continued to isolate “even after receiving a negative result” until health authorities contacted her.
Queensland Police said if the woman’s case involved “any compliance issues … that is something police will look at, at the appropriate time”.
“Our priority right now is to ensure anyone who may have been exposed comes forward and gets tested as a precaution,” a police statement said. “It is extremely important that if you have been to an exposure site either in Queensland or across Australia that you follow the directions from authorities very closely.”
The woman was fully vaccinated against Covid-19 and insists she wore masks while on public transport, but Dr Young admitted she was concerned about the potential for the virus to spread.
“We’ll just have to see how it flows over the next few days,” Dr Young said.
She said she was most concerned about friends the woman stayed with in Maroochydore last week and household contacts at Mareeba. She flew to Cairns on July 16 on flight VA791.
Dr Young said the woman began to develop symptoms while at Mareeba, her home town, on Saturday and went to the Atherton fever clinic for testing on Sunday.
In the meantime Covid testing centres around the Far North will have their hours extended amid concerns the two cases identified in the region on Tuesday may not be the only ones.
A passenger on a private plane which landed in Cairns was also among three new cases in Queensland, with fears both may have the highly contagious Delta variant.
While risk to the community is considered low for both cases, health authorities were taking no chances with contact tracing under way in relation to the Mareeba case and the hours and capacity of the region’s testing centres to be increased.
Cairns’ Covid-19 vaccination program executive director Dr Don Mackie admitted he had “concern” about further cases in the region. “She is just one person who has come up into our local area,” he said. “There will be other people who have travelled through those areas so I’ve got a degree of concern that this may not be the only one.”