WATCH: Staff member from second care home tested positive

At the last press conference it was confirmed that two members of staff and two residents from La Grande Lande Residential Home in St Saviour's had tested positive.

Today it was revealed that another care home, this time with around four times as many staff and residents.

Chair of the Civil Contingencies Authority Deputy Peter Ferbrache said no changes to the current lockdown rules would be made.

But the CCA is meeting tomorrow and any changes will be announced at Wednesday's press conference.

'The lockdown is working, but it will only work if people continue to be vigilant,' Deputy Ferbrache said.

'This beast will not go away, it's looking to cause harm to our community so we must all stay at home when we can, only go out for our exercise, we must wear masks in public and continue with good hygiene.'

He said the general trend was that the figures were heading in a positive direction but the cause of this latest outbreak was still not known.

While it could have been a breach of travel and self-isolation rules, it could equally have been an innocent accident and people should not speculate.

'Nobody is seeking to protect anybody and nobody is seeking to hide anything,' he said, while emphasising how the Covid-19 panel were not shy of giving bad news.

Clarifying some confusion about how the two hours of exercise could be spent, he said: 'You can go out with members of your household, you can also go with one member of another household.

'But you must [adhere to] social distancing, you must wear a mask and you must have a high degree of good hygiene.'

The only exception to that is if someone is a single parent with a family, that family can meet up with one member of another household, socially distanced.

It does not mean that two single-parent households can meet up with both sets of children.

Director of Public Health Dr Nicola Brink gave a summary of what the current situation is.

Since 22 January, there have been 431 positive cases identified.

While there have not been any deaths in this latest outbreak, Dr Brink said it was still early days.

The first four cases that were identified at the very start of this outbreak were sent to the UK for genetic typing.

'All four of them are the UK variant of the virus,' she confirmed.

'This fits in with our understanding because we were seeing rapid spread of the virus in the way we simply didn't see in the first wave.'

From 28 February to 2 February, the island saw a peak in positive cases.

'What we need to focus on are those cases of unknown community transmission because those are the ones where we can't explain their links and those are the ones we are concerned about,' Dr Brink said.

'We have recently had a decrease of unknown community sources.

'What's important as we move forward; although we had some cases that were classified as unknown sources, of the five last cases there was only one that we genuinely could not link to any source.'

With the other four cases, they occurred in areas of interest where previous cases were found.

Mentioning surveillance testing, she said two teachers had tested positive for the virus in their back-to-school tests.

All of the residents in the first care home affected by the virus in this second wave were transferred to the hospital to provide further care.

No further cases have been found there.

'On Friday and into the weekend we identified another case in a care home.'

This person had really mild symptoms and came forward for testing.

All of the residents and staff were immediately tested and no positive results returned.

'We are enourmously grateful for the staff at St John's [Residential Home] for working closely with us,' she said.

The number of cases from unknown sources and found through contact tracing are levelling out.

But Dr Brink said the numbers could 'bounce' in the coming days as the UK variant spreads through households very quickly.

As of 1pm today, no new cases had been found.

'It's the first time since 22 January that we've had no new cases by 1pm, and although it's early that is positive news.'

Most of the infected people in the island are ages between 41 and 70.

Concluding, she strongly recommended people wearing masks when they are around other people, urging people to take a common sense approach.

Medical director Dr Peter Rabey said there are 10 patients in hospital with Covid-19.

Two are in intensive care and eight are in the Brock ward, two of whom were in the first affected care home.

'They remain well,' he said.

More to follow.