Media Release                                                                   

COVID-19 Update

March 17th, 2021

STATEMENT FROM THE MINISTRY OF HEALTH ON COVID-19 UPDATE

The Ministry of Health and Medical Services is announcing 1 new border quarantine case of COVID-19.

This is a 55-year-old male who travelled to Fiji from Port Moresby Papua New Guinea, arriving in Nadi on flight FJ1920 from Brisbane on March 12.

He returned a positive test result during routine testing while undergoing 14-day quarantine at a government-supervised border quarantine facility in Nadi. He has been transferred to the isolation unit at the Lautoka hospital under our standard protocols for positive cases.

Also, since the last update on March 17, there has been 1 new recovery, leaving this new border quarantine case as the 1 active case currently admitted at the Lautoka hospital isolation unit.

It has now been exactly 1 year since Fiji recorded its first case of COVID-19 on March 19 2020. Since our first case was reported, Fiji has now had 67 cases, with 64 recoveries and 2 deaths. The last 49 cases have been international travel-associated cases detected in border quarantine. It has been 335 days since the last case was detected outside border quarantine on April 18 2020.

A total of 34,782 laboratory tests have been conducted, with a daily average of 210 tests per day over the last 7 days, and a weekly average of 1615 tests per week over the last 2 weeks.

For more information on COVID-19 in Fiji please visit the Ministry of Health and Medical Services web page http://www.health.gov.fj

The next scheduled update will be on Monday 22 March.