Sydney's sudden and mysterious COVID case
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What is the mysterious COVID‑19 case reported in New South Wales?
This is an ABC podcast. Hello, this is Coronacast, a daily podcast all about the coronavirus. I'm health reporter and host of the Patient Zero podcast, Olivia Willis.
And I'm physician and journalist, Dr Norman Swan. It's Thursday, the 6th of May 2021. Welcome, Liv.
Thank you. I'm going to be filling in for Tegan over the next couple of days. And, well, it's been a big 24 hours in COVID-19 news.
Yeah, you just go to sleep and what do you wake up to? A new case in New South Wales, 50-year-old man, apparently with no contact. He hasn't traveled overseas, doesn't work in hotel quarantine. First case of community transmission in New South Wales for some time. It's stunned the state, I suspect.
It has, and it's a little puzzling. And New South Wales Health is currently doing genome sequencing. That's underway to try and figure out where this might have come from. Norman, what can that genome sequencing kind of tell us in terms of maybe how long the virus has been in the community?
So they've got a database of genomic testing and they can go and search what cases turned up, whether or not. I mean, for example, yes, this person could have caught it from a chain of transmission from hotel quarantine in New South Wales. It could have been somebody off the plane from Western Australia or Queensland. As we know, this virus can circulate underground in a young population who are asymptomatic and you don't know about them and then suddenly emerge. And so genome testing will give us an idea of where it's come from. It's unlikely that genome testing will turn out to be a mystery because it's going to have to come from somewhere, a positive case at some time in the last few weeks. And that will have almost certainly been documented in Australia.
So it should tie this down.
Right. And so yesterday at the press conference, they mentioned that he had a low CT value. What does that mean?
Well, the CT value is really a measure of how live and infectious the virus is. And the lower it is, the more infectious it is. So what that indicates is that this is not an old virus that's inactive in this person. This is an active virus. So paradoxically, a low CT indicates a bigger problem potentially.
Now, we know the man visited a number of venues across the city while he was infectious. There were some restaurants listed, a cinema. Those close contacts are being followed up. But the Premier, New South Wales Premier Gladys Berejiklian, said that she expected to see some more cases, positive cases in coming days. Norman, are we likely to see quite an uptick just because, you know, things like social distancing, mask use, those things are a little bit more lax at the moment because we haven't had much virus in the community?
Yeah, I mean, I'm down in Melbourne at the moment and Melbournians are shocked when they see pictures of Sydney. They're also shocked when they arrive at Sydney airport to see so few people, even though they're supposed to be wearing masks. I mean, Sydney is behaving as if there's no problem here. then what you get is, and if you go back to Coronacast of last year and you talk about the theoretical modelling, what we talked about last year was that with so few cases of community transmission in Queensland and Western Australia, that people were behaving as if the reproductive value was round about 1.3. So in other words, if the virus were to land there, it would spread quite quickly. And that's the situation in New South Wales.
People are pretty good at registering with the QR code, but there's not much mask wearing, if any, and people are back to normal.
So, Norman, how do you reckon this compares to the other outbreaks we've had recently? Is it kind of more or less of a concern or still too early to say?
Well, it's exactly the same problem that Queensland faced with the medical registrar at PA, where the virus was circulating in the community for quite a few days, where in Western Australia, on two occasions, you've had the virus circulating for a while in the community, and you're really not sure how much it's circulating.
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