Health tracing 73 contacts from single Covid-19 patient
AN INDIVIDUAL in Guernsey who carried on their usual activities for several days despite being unwell with coronavirus symptoms has created 73 contacts who are being traced.
The person tested positive for the virus and has generated the largest number of contacts in the local outbreak and they are all now being painstakingly tracked down by the Public Health team.
Most positive cases give rise to about 20 contacts, but this one case created significantly more because he or she attempted to carry on life as normal.
As of last night, there were 36 positive cases in the Bailiwick, which was a rise of two people in 24 hours.
Some 71 people are awaiting results.
In total, there have been 472 samples taken and 365 negative results and no Covid-19 deaths.
It is estimated that there are 1,439 islanders under compulsory self-isolation, which equates to 2.2% of the island's population.
Of this number, 1,156 are returning travellers such as students, and about 154 are contacts of the confirmed cases.
The majority of the confirmed cases picked up the disease while away from the island, in either Jersey, the UK, France, Tenerife, Spain, Germany, Austria and Switzerland.
As least three of the confirmed cases are what is called 'community seeding' because they got infected by someone in Guernsey.
Contact tracing is considered vital to stopping the spread of the disease and is said to be progressing 'well'.
This quick detective work finds out who else might have been exposed to the virus and possibly acquired it from the infected person.
