In recent weeks, there have been two mystery cases of Australians testing positive for COVID-19 months after returning from overseas both in Queensland – and operators say they do not understand why this is not front-page news.
As we covered here, a Brisbane woman in her 70s was diagnosed last week two months after returning from India via Singapore, with authorities saying it appeared she acquired the virus overseas.
In the second case this week, a Cairns woman in her 60s tested positive after eight weeks disembarking the Roby Princess cruise ship on 19 March.
The state’s Chief Medical Officer, Dr Jeannette Young, said: “We’ve not seen cases in Cairns for a while so I think it’s very unlikely [that it is the result of community transmission]”.
The CEO of an aged care home in Far North Queensland reached out to us to raise his concerns.
“I am at a loss as to why it is not the lead story on all news broadcasts,” he says.
“If the disease can sit dormant for eight weeks before manifesting, then our rules about 14 days isolation are seriously compromised. An aged care facility might have to rewrite all of our plans for visitation and dealing with incoming residents.”
A good point. Currently the Department of Health allows visitors who have returned from overseas provided they have completed a 14-day quarantine and are not showing any symptoms.
But as the outbreaks at Dorothy Henderson Lodge and Newmarch House have shown, many of those infected are asymptomatic – and it now seems that the virus has a longer lifespan than believed.
