Queensland’s COVID-19 outbreak has grown overnight, with 10 new cases, eight of those locally acquired.
Six are close contacts of confirmed cases, and two others are still under investigation.
Health authorities have now identified two distinct clusters, both strains of the highly infectious UK variant.
It comes as Greater Brisbane, including Logan City continues its first day of a snap three-day lockdown, introduced after health authorities revealed a COVID-19 cluster involving the highly contagious UK strain had grown to seven people yesterday.
Among them is a nurse at the Princess Alexandra Hospital and her sister, who both visited Byron Bay for a hens party during their infectious period.
The nurse, who wasn’t vaccinated, is the second public hospital frontline health care worker to contract the virus this month after a doctor from the same hospital.
Premier Anastacia Palaszczuk has said. “The good news is, these cases are linked and we now believe there are two distinct clusters.We have a cluster linked of course to that PA doctor, and we have a second cluster linked to the PA nurse.”
There are now 78 active cases of COVID-19 in Queensland hospitals.
“Now, of course, we want to get on top of this community transmission, so the steps that we took to go into this lockdown, as you can see by those numbers of community transmission today, was absolutely the right call,” she said.
Chief Health Officer Dr Jeannette Young said there was no community transmission “we’re not aware of. We know they’re all linked because of the genome sequence. They’re all a B117 linked back to that case at the PA Hospital.”
Dr Young said it was likely the nurse caught the virus on an overnight shift on March 23, not during a shift in the COVID ward, days earlier.
But how she caught it was still under investigation.
She said the nurse’s sister was infected with the same genome.
“Then there are a further five cases that I’ve been informed of overnight linked to that nurse or her sister. So, they’re all linked cases, and they all attended a party together down in Byron Bay,” she said. One of the positive cases in that second cluster attended the hens party as an entertainer He works as a tradie, and he did go to an aged care facility on the Gold Coast”.
“But every resident in that aged care facility has already been vaccinated, had their first dose. The team down at the Gold Coast are organising to go to the facility today and vaccinate the staff of that facility.”
Ms Palaszczuk said she understood the hens party on the Gold Coast was contained to a house.
She also said so far there had not been any positive cases linked to a different positive case who travelled to Gladstone while infected.
Ms Palaszczuk said she could not give certainty over whether the region would remain in lockdown for the Easter long weekend.
