Residents of Nabouwalu in Bua are awaiting word on whether there will be a lockdown after a worker at the port of entry there tested positive for COVID-19 on the weekend.
On Saturday, the Ministry of Health announced that measures would be announced after officials in the Northern Division briefed Permanent Secretary Dr James Fong later in the weekend.
No update was provided last night, for either the case in the North or the daily national COVID-19 update.
“Nabouwalu is a small community. We are worried that there might be a huge community transmission,” a mother of five, who chose not to be named, said this morning.
It is understood that swabbing of primary and secondary contacts was carried out on Saturday and Sunday at the Nabouwalu hospital.
As of 14 August, vaccination deployment in Bua stood at 73% and 8.1% for dose 1 and dose 2 respectively. For the whole of the North, 80.3% of their target population have received their first dose and 11.5%, are fully vaccinated.
In MOH’s last update three days ago, there were 23,598 active cases, of which 17,269 are in the Central Division, and 6328 in the Western Division and 1 active case in the Northern Division. There have been 39,700 cases during the outbreak that started in April 2021. There were 368 deaths due to COVID-19 in Fiji, with 366 of these deaths during the outbreak that started in April this year. The national 7 day rolling average of COVID-19 deaths per day is nine. There have also been 194 COVID-19 positive patients who died from the serious medical conditions that they had before they contracted COVID-19; these are not classified as COVID-19 deaths.
As of reporting time at 8am Friday 13 August, there were 274 COVID-19 patients admitted to the hospital. 70 patients are admitted to the Lautoka Hospital, 56 patients are admitted at the FEMAT field hospital, and 148 admitted at CWM hospital, St Giles, and Makoi. 66 patients are considered to be in severe condition, and 8 are in critical condition.
