South Australia records one new case, sets national testing record
South Australia has recorded one more case of coronavirus but the infected person has been in quarantine since Monday last week.
The case is linked to the Parafield cluster and is a close contact of another case, the state’s chief public health officer Professor Nicola Spurrier told reporters this afternoon.
“We are re-swabbing all of the close contacts and we had an early morning result this morning that was positive,” she said.
The latest infection attended a family gathering with other known cases but had a longer than expected incubation period and had earlier returned two negative test results, Prof Spurrier explained.
“Anybody who has been asked to be in quarantine needs to be in quarantine for the whole 14 days because there are people that have a very much longer incubation period.”
There are now 27 cases linked to the Parafield cluster.
“We still have just one person hospitalised and that's a person in his 30s and he is stable fortunately. But everybody else remains relatively well,” Prof Spurrier said.
Premier Steven Marshall was upbeat about the result but warned against complacency.
“We are still not out of the woods yet. As Professor Nicola Spurrier has said we still remain very concerned about this cluster and it is important that we still continue to maintain our testing regime in South Australia,” he said.
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Premier praises 'fantastic' testing numbers
Premier Marshall praised residents for coming forward for testing in recent days.
“We are continuing to see fantastic testing numbers in South Australia. Last week over 77,000,” he said.
“On Friday we set a new national record in terms of the number of people tested per capita on a single day.”
On Sunday, health authorities conducted another 8,689 tests, he said.
On Sunday Mr Marshall praised South Australians and said the state had avoided a “catastrophic situation”.
The state’s health authorities pointed to a forecast model which projected how cases could accumulate in the state by mid-December if the short lockdown, which lasted for three days, was not implemented and the state didn’t “supercharge” contact tracing.
Prof Spurrier earlier said there was a 50 per cent chance the state could have seen 100 daily cases by mid-December.
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