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Government Medicine

New Zealand Can't Find Source of Its New Covid-19 Cases (nzherald.co.nz) 199

Posted by EditorDavid from the carrier-lost dept.
A new cluster of Covid-19 cases in New Zealand prompted a widespread investigation to identify where they're coming from. The New Zealand Herald reports: Nearly 90 new cases of Covid-19 have now been linked back to the new cluster, which itself stemmed from an "index case" — a 50-year-old man working at Mt Wellington's Americold coolstore, with no history or link to overseas travel. Contact tracers have been trying to work backwards from that index case, who tested positive on August 11, in hopes of finding the "primary case" — or the person who brought the virus into the country in the first place.

Friday — more than a week and 175,000 tests since the start of the outbreak — Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern shared some details on how exhaustive that process had been. Virtually all of the country's border and managed isolation staff have been tested in the past 10 days, and so far there had been no additional cases, outside the mystery infection of a maintenance worker at Auckland's Rydges hotel...

University of Auckland microbiologist Associate Professor Siouxsie Wiles says it's quite possible we'll never get any further. "Is that a big deal? From the testing we've done so far, it looks like this is a pretty tight cluster — so I would say, no," she said. "What we have lost is the opportunity to know how it happened, or what gaps need plugging. But at the same time, we have to remember that nothing is 100 per cent guaranteed to work all of the time."
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New Zealand Can't Find Source of Its New Covid-19 Cases More

New Zealand Can't Find Source of Its New Covid-19 Cases

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  • At least they are handling it (Score:5, Insightful)

    by OMBad ( 6965950 ) on Sunday August 23, 2020 @02:52PM (#60433085)
    Here in the US the cases are out of control and people are dying en masse. Maybe we can borrow New Zealand's leadership. They seem to know what they are doing.

  • How about checking those rich Americans who spent all that money on one of those buried bunkers there in NZ?

    Just go pop the hatch. If you don't get shot in the face, and you smell a dead body, you've probably found the source.

  • Viruses are tenacious. It's possible that people with COVID left them in or on something the store imported for sale.

    • It's been investigated with 35 samples being taken from the environment. A few were found weakly positive - from the people who worked there who were sick. None of the external vectors (imported products) showed any sign of the virus.

    • Re:What does the store sell, and is any of it impo (Score:5, Informative)

      by AK Marc ( 707885 ) on Sunday August 23, 2020 @03:34PM (#60433217)
      Americold is an American based company that specializes in cold storage shipping. Americold's NZ HQ is in Australia. I expect that Americold had some contact in hand-off from goods shipped from Australia to NZ. Milk is generally local, but most foreign NZ food goes through Australia. Lots of things are packaged around the world and frozen. Then cold-shipped everywhere. Some frozen pies or whatever are shipped in from Woolworths (Australia) to WWNZ (Foodstuffs probably buys some as well that comes internationally, but less, because they are NZ based and owned, but plenty of "Pams" items in Foodstuffs stores are imported).

      So people have to get close as the cargo is moved from ship/plane to truck. Best case, it comes in on a cargo ship in containers that are craned off and onto a truck. If that's the case, then this could be a case of surface transmission, which is rare, and nearly impossible to trace.

  • Someone is lying (Score:4, Insightful)

    by sethmeisterg ( 603174 ) on Sunday August 23, 2020 @03:19PM (#60433175)
    Unfortunately the contact traders have to go back and double check everyone's story because there is clearly someone lying.

  • Outdated article (Score:5, Informative)

    by Lanthanide ( 4982283 ) on Sunday August 23, 2020 @03:20PM (#60433179)

    This article is about 3 days old. The maintenance worker in the Rydges hotel is no longer a mystery.

    Genomic sequencing had proved it is not linked to the community cluster, and that he caught the infection from a traveler from the US. Investigation of their movements in the isolation hotel shows she used a lift and the maintenance worker used the same lift within a few minutes of her. The expectation is he was infected from the lift buttons.

    From testing, he hasn't spread his infection on to anyone else, and all close contacts are in self isolation.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      That's a scary reminder of how easy it is to get infected. People give me funny looks when I use my little brass door opener thingy to press the buttons in the lift but I'm going to keep doing it.

      • It's also a pretty insane contrast with the US. They're down to investigating every transmission like a big event. We have 50,000 or so new cases every day.

        • If you had done quarantine, lock down, testing, and contact tracing from day one, you had not 50k new cases every day.

          Can't be so hard to grasp that doing the right things is cheaper in the long run than doing nothing.

      • What the heck is the "brass door opener thingy"?

        • Re: (Score:3)

          by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

          I got it on eBay, search for "brass door opener". It looks like an oversize key. You can use it to pull handles open or to press buttons. Unfortunately doesn't work with capacitative touch screens.

          The idea is to avoid touching the surface yourself. Brass has anti-viral properties, for some reason that isn't well understood viruses and bacteria die fast on brass surfaces.

          • Probably the copper in the brass which is widely known to have anti bacterial properties. I wonder if you can get silver ones as its even better.

          • Well...there is is. I thought it you were referring to some kind of arcane, one-off creation. However, it isn't. They indeed are available all over the place.

            For reference, I'd say most of them are shaped like lowercase letter "g", about three inches tall. The hole is big enough to hook a finger through, like some kind of weird brass-knuckle.

  • They are trying to kill us as we kill them.

  • That's to Susie almost like ghoti to fish.

  • Air cushions in refrigerated freight (Score:4, Interesting)

    by sonamchauhan ( 587356 ) <sonamc@NOsPam.gmail.com> on Sunday August 23, 2020 @08:32PM (#60434091) Journal

    I suspect air cushions commonly used as padding to protect goods in refrigerated freight.

    Think bubble wrap, but with much larger air-filled bubbles, and made onsite at the packing plant. Researchers [qut.edu.au] recently persuaded WHO to accept that the virus stays active in the air for longer distances and times than previously accepted. So you take the 'infected air' containing virus aerosols, package it up in a nice little refrigerated bubble and send it overseas, where it's popped as packaging is recycled or disposed. What do you get, but active, 'infected air' at the receiver address.

    Here are some of the machines that make the packaging:
    https://www.google.com/search?... [google.com]

    They really cry out for heating, HEPA filters and UVC sterilization at their air intakes.

  • If it's a tight cluster of cases I think someone isn't telling everything they know

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