People queue at a Covid-19 testing station in Melbourne on 25 May 2021.
Photo: AFP
One person who tested positive attended a football match at the Melbourne Cricket Ground where more than 20,000 fans were present.
University of Canterbury mathematician Mike Plank told
Morning Report that testing over the next three or four days would give a better picture of the situation.
He said the presence of the Indian variant was a concern because it was highly infectious. This cluster has grown very quickly to nine cases now and several of those have been infectious in the community for up to a week so it s likely they will have passed the virus on to other people.
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Staff at the Howard Springs quarantine facility will no longer be tested for COVID-19 using rapid diagnostic technology, as the Northern Territory government changes protocols at one of Australiaâs major pandemic arrival points.
In a move that has left commercial suppliers baffled, the Northern Territoryâs Chief Health Officer last week issued a directive requiring staff working at Centre for National Resilience near Darwin to undergo daily polymerase chain reaction tests â known as PCR testing.
Travellers in quarantine at Howard Springs in the Northern Territory.Â
Ben Sale
Ending the use of rapid antigen testing for quarantine workers means that, instead of getting results in as little as 15 minutes, staff at Howard Springs could be required to wait as long as six to 24 hours.
Australia says it is sending 10,000 Covid-19 vaccine doses to Fiji this week, and double that amount to Timor-Leste.
Fiji has reportedly run out of vaccine doses, at a time when its health authorities are scrambling to contain community transmission of the coronavirus.
The country has already used 50,000 AstraZeneca doses for its national vaccination programme.
Australia has sent an initial batch of 8,000 doses of AstraZeneca-developed Covid-19 vaccines to Papua New Guinea.
Photo: Australian High Commission in PNG
Another 10,000 doses will be delivered by Australia to its partners in Fiji this week via the Covax facility, according to a joint statement from Greg Hunt, Australian Minister for Health and Aged Care and Zed Seselja, Minister for International Development and the Pacific.