Fiji’s active coronavirus cases have increased to 20 after the second daughter of the country’s hotel staff otherwise known as case 74 tested positive for coronavirus.
The 14-year-old girl had been in quarantine since Sunday 18 April and tested positive on day four of her stay, which meant that she was unlikely to have been infectious before she entered quarantine, health authorities say.
“We know that this virus has an incubation period of up to 14 days. So a person may take up to 14 days to have enough virus in their bodies to develop symptoms or trigger a positive test result. Importantly, the level of virus that becomes detectable on a test also relates to how infectious that person is at the time. If someone has no symptoms and tests negative in the community, it is very unlikely that they were infectious, even if they later test positive during the 14-day quarantine period.
Three of these latest local cases were not infectious while they were in the community, we know this because they had no symptoms at the time, and were negative on their first test when they entered quarantine. It was only on their second test in quarantine that they tested positive.
Fiji’s Permanent Secretary of Health and Medical Services Dr James Fong
The 14-year-old is the second of the hotel staff or case 74’s daughters to have tested positive for the virus, after her 26-year-old daughter whose status was announced on Tuesday, 20 April. The latest case brings to six Fiji’s locally transmitted cases linked back to the military officer or Fiji’s case 73. The 33-year-old military officer is regarded as a border quarantine case given the nature in which he had contracted the virus. He is one of the country’s 14 border quarantine cases, bringing to 20 Fiji’s total active cases in isolation.
Fiji has had 87 cases in total, with 65 recoveries and two deaths, since the first case was reported on 19 March 2020. Sixty-three of these cases have been international travel-associated cases detected in border quarantine. The six recently announced cases are Fiji’s first cases of local transmission in over a year.
