Bloomfield confident in NZ facilities despite Victoria’s Covid-19 outbreak – Stuff.co.nz

Director-General of Health Dr Ashley Bloomfield says he has confidence in the processes at Covid-19 managed isolation facilities in this country, after the virus leaked out of quarantine in Melbourne and sparked a community outbreak.
Last Thursday, the Victorian Government put metropolitan Melbourne back into Stage 3 Stay at Home restrictions for six weeks, after a spike in Covid-19 cases in the city.
City residents are only supposed to leave home for shopping for food and supplies, medical care and caregiving, exercise and recreation, and study and work if they cant be done from home.
A medical professional conducts a nasal swab test at a Covid-19 drive-through testing centre in Sydney. A community cluster of the disease has been linked to a popular hotel in the citys southwest.
Beauty and personal care services, cultural and entertainment venues and community facilities have been closed down, while cafes and restaurants returned to take-away and delivery only.
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Health officials have also advised residents to wear a cloth mask when they leave home.
On Monday, Victoria reported 177 new cases of Covid-19 since Sunday. It was the eighth day in a row of three-digit increases, with the largest being 288 announced on Friday.
There were 1612 active cases in Victoria on Monday, with 72 people in hospital, including 17 in intensive care.
Breakfast reporter Wilson Longhurst recaps the latest Covid-19 news on July 13.
In a briefing on Monday, Bloomfield said he was interested in learning more about what led to Covid-19 infection getting out of managed isolation facilities in Victoria into the community.
Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews has said genome sequencing of recent virus cases in Melbourne traced some infections back to staff members at Melbourne quarantine facilities breaching infection control protocols.
Bloomfield said he had confidence in the processes being used in managed isolation facilities in New Zealand.
So far over 29,000 people through our facilities and we havent had any cases of community acquired Covid-19 as a result of people coming out of those facilities, he said.
I do have a meeting planned in the next week or two with my counterpart in Australia, and this is one of the things well be discussing.
We continue to be very interested in learning from each other about what else we can do to improve both managed isolation and quarantine but also the follow-up in terms of contact tracing and testing that they are doing, not just in Victoria but of course now in New South Wales as well.
In New South Wales, 14 new cases of Covid-19 were diagnosed in the 24 hours to 8pm Sunday.
The US state of Florida contributed to those numbers with its own daily record of 15,300 cases.
State health officials set up a pop-up clinic in the carpark of a hotel in southwest Sydney popular with interstate truck drivers and locals. A cluster of cases linked to the hotel has grown to 13, and anyone who visited the venue from July 3-10 is being urged to self-isolate for a fortnight.
In New Zealand, there were no new cases of Covid-19 reported on Monday and all the 25 active cases in the country have been confirmed to have been in isolation and quarantine facilities for people returning from overseas. It has been 73 days since the last case of Covid-19 was acquired locally from an unknown source.
A Kiwi with a good view of what is happening in Victoria is epidemiologist Tony Blakely, formerly of the University of Otago and now at the University of Melbourne.
In an Otago university blog dated July 3, he said Victoria had not eliminated Covid-19 and so was always going to have outbreaks.
Outbreaks linked to two hotels used as quarantine facilities appeared largely to be among contracted private company security guards.
Medical staff at a pop-up COVID-19 testing clinic, perform tests on drivers in the Sydney suburb of Casula. A hotel in the area has been linked to a community cluster of the disease.
This under-trained workforce (not their fault) are also, unsurprisingly, living in lower socioeconomic suburbs with larger families, more crowding, and so on. Boom the perfect recipe for things to go wrong, Blakely said.
With outbreaks in two hotels it appeared there had been a systems failure.
To be clear, mistakes will happen in a fast moving pandemic situation. Moreover, from what I can gauge the Premier and CHO (chief health officer) and their teams have mostly done an amazing job but there was a chink in the armour, that the virus exploited, Blakely said.
One of the lessons from the outbreak was the importance, once Covid-19 was eliminated, of hanging on to that status.
Another was to do with quarantine standards. Military like precision. Minimise risk of cross-infection. Train your staff. Strong procedures, Blakely said.
And, yes, maybe use last century facilities out in rural NZ with separated houses or similar; trying to pull off water-tight quarantine in compact, vertical, downtown hotels seems to be tricky.

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