Confirmed: Highly contagious strain in Vic

Victoria’s chief health officer Brett Sutton said on Friday morning genomic sequencing had confirmed the worker had contracted the B.1.1.7 mutant strain of COVID-19.The 26-year-old man from Noble Park, who was working for the Australian Open quarantine program, returned a positive COVID-19 test result on Wednesday.“That’s the variant that was first identified in the UK, it is a more transmissible variant of concern,” Professor Sutton said.“We’ve always worked on the assumption that it was going to be this variant. “That’s because four of the six residents who’d tested positive at the hotel had that variant identified in them.”Prof Sutton said who exactly the man had got the virus from was still to be determined.“We probably can’t say definitively whether it was one of those individuals out of the six positives,” he said.

“We do need to marry-up that genomics information with the epidemiological information.“So the CCTV footage, the interviews, to really understand how transmission might have occurred.“We’re confident at the moment it’s not been picked up in the community but from one of the residents in the hotel.”The worker doesn’t appear to have spread the virus with 16 of the man’s 17 social and household contacts testing negative. The final result is expected on Friday.Prof Sutton maintained there was no apparent breach of infection prevention and control protocols, or PPE, but health officials would re-examine what took place at Grand Hyatt Hotel.

He said droplet spread was managed using PPE and 1.5m social distancing but airborne spread, through aerosolised particles, could move even further than that.“Airborne transmission is probably more likely with variants of concern, it has always been a possibility, but it’s going to be a bigger risk factor going forward,” Prof Sutton said.Premier Daniel Andrews said authorities had “spared not effort” to try and run the outbreak into the ground.

“It’s very clear the risk we face now is very different to what is was a month ago or six months ago,” Mr Andrews said.Victoria has recorded no new local cases since the man tested positive from more than 22,500 tests.The health department confirmed three new cases were recorded on Friday morning, all in returned travellers in hotel quarantine.
jack.paynter@news.com.au