Last Updated on 3 years by Publishing Team

Media Release                                                                 

COVID-19 Update

Monday April 26th 2021

As announced by the Permanent Secretary for Health and Medical Services today, we have 12 new cases to report.

The first case is a soldier working in a border quarantine facility, and is the roommate of case 73, the first border quarantine soldier announced to have been infected by the virus on Sunday April 18^th. This new case had tested negative on his first test, and does not pose a transmission risk to the public as he has been contained within the government quarantine facility since Sunday April 18^th, and tested positive now after 7 days in quarantine.

Four of the new cases are close contacts of the hotel quarantine staff who travelled to the funeral in Tavakubu. The 4 tested negative when they entered quarantine but have now tested positive. This indicates that they were not infectious while in the community.

The next seven new cases are related, and are all close household contacts of the 29-year old female from Makoi who we revealed yesterday was potentially our first case of community transmission. By community transmission we mean a case that cannot be linked to other cases or to international travel. As mentioned yesterday, finding a case of community transmission is of great concern, because it indicates that an outbreak is widespread and uncontrolled, with a devastating outbreak imminent. However, further investigation has revealed that the infected woman’s husband is a 30-year old soldier who works in a border quarantine facility in Nadi, and he has tested positive. As per protocol this soldier was tested for the virus on April 10^th before being released to return home to Suva on April 12^th, and he had tested negative. We can confirm that, between the negative test result on April 10^th and returning home on April 12^th, he had close contact with case 73, the border quarantine soldier who had also tested negative on 10^th April and likely got infected shortly after swabbing. Unfortunately this soldier, who is the husband of the Makoi case, came into contact with case 73, before case 73 was found to be positive.

The entire family was transferred to a government supervised quarantine facility yesterday.

Establishing this link between the Makoi case back to case 73 means that this case will now be re-classified as a case of local transmission, and not community transmission.

With these latest cases there are now 36 active cases in isolation. Five are older border quarantine cases announced before Sunday April 18th. Nine are recently announced border quarantine cases, and 22 are locally transmitted cases.

Fiji has had 103 cases in total, with 65 recoveries and 2 deaths, since our first case was reported on March 19^th 2020. 63 of these cases have been international travel associated cases detected in border quarantine. 22 cases reported since Sunday April 18^th are our first locally transmitted cases in over 1 year.

A total of 48,167 COVID-19 laboratory tests have been conducted, with a daily average of 738 tests per day over the last 7 days. Daily testing has increased in line with the response to the recent local cases, with 737 tests conducted yesterday. Our overall test positivity is 0.2% and our 7 day average daily test positivity is 0.7%.