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Late last month Fiji ordered two of its largest cities into lockdown after the Pacific Island nation recorded its first cases of community transmission of COVID-19 since a handful of cases were identified early on in the pandemic.
With cases only reported in hotel quarantine in the past 12 months, the new community transmission caught many Fijian’s by surprise. Confirmed cases have risen steadily since a Fijian soldier was infected at a quarantine facility, with active cases jumping to 50 in the two weeks since. While seemingly trivial compared to the 400,000 recorded daily in India or the 300,000 cases recorded daily in the U.S. back in January, it’s a huge hit to a country that had high hopes of making it through the pandemic unscathed.
We cannot let that nightmare happen in Fiji, he said in a televised address. We still have time to stop it happening but a single misstep will bring about the same Covid tsunami that our friends in India, Brazil, South Africa, the United Kingdom and the United States are enduring.
Fiji has largely contained the virus through strict isolation measures and border controls, recording 109 cases and just two deaths in a population of 930,000.
There are currently 42 active cases, 18 of them detected at the border and 24 locally transmitted.
The cluster began when a soldier contracted the virus at a quarantine facility and transmitted it to his wife, who then exposed up to 500 people at a funeral.
ANISH CHAND
16 December, 2020, 9:00 pm
Members of the Fiji
security forces attend
to a report of COVID-19
at a settlement in
Nabua, Suva in April
this year. The Fiji
Police Force used
$698,661 from the
Head 50 allocation
while $150,000 was
given to the Republic
of Fiji Military Forces,
according to the OAG
Report. Picture: FILE
The Fiji COVID-19 Preparedness and Response Plan was not submitted for Cabinet’s endorsement, says the Auditor- General’s Report on Compliance Audits Relating to COVID-19 Response that was tabled in Parliament last week.
The objective of the audit was to obtain sufficient and appropriate evidence to form a conclusion on whether the Ministry of Health and Medical Services (MoHMS) through the Incident Management Team (IMT) had implemented response actions in accordance with Fiji Coronavirus (COVID-19) Preparedness and Response Plan.