FRI COVID UPDATE – HAWKESBURY LIVING DEATH – PITT TOWN PS CLOSED – LOCAL ACTIVE CASES RISE 7 TO 106

A 96 year old male resident at Richmond’s Hawkesbury Living aged care home has officially been confirmed a victim of COVID after he passed away earlier this week. The news was confirmed by NSW Health at this morning’s media conference.

The man received a positive COVID result the day before he passed away – on Monday. Because of that the death was recorded as due to COVID.

Hawkesbury active COVID cases have risen 7 in the last 24 hours, taking the total of active cases to 106 – and no that’s not incorrect, it means one person out of the Active list has recovered, which is some good news.

In NSW there were 1431 new COVID cases in the last 24 hours. There are almost 1000 people in hospital (979) with COVID in the state, with 160 people in intensive care and 63 needing ventilation.

Yesterday Pitt Town Public School was closed after someone with COVID visited.

We’re waiting to hear officially when the school will be open again but areas where the person visited will need to be deep cleaned before the school reopens.

We have also been told a pre-school, visited by family member of the same person who visited the Public School, has also been closed. We’re trying to get firm details on that this morning.

There is also chatter among media circles about contact tracing being wound back in favour of venues and employers alerting visitors and employees, simply because of the rising number of cases.

A journalist asked this morning about that and Premier Berejiklian said

contact tracers were not stretched, but admitted things will change as numbers climb:

“Obviously when we get to 70% double dose, we will be a transition as to how we handle a lot of things,” she said.

“We have the adult population vaccinated it means we do things differently.

“Let me assure you our contact tracers are on the job, they are doing incredibly well given the circumstances and again, when you look at the number of cases we have and how many days we are into the pandemic.

“I just want to assure people how our systems are holding up, how we put planning in place for a long time, that we know this will be the most difficult period of time for all of our frontline health workers, and for many of them they are already feeling it.

“I’m not suggesting there won’t be bad days, I’m not suggesting there won’t be examples where people won’t feel let down. Let’s face it, this happens even when the system is not in a pandemic.

“We have one of the best health systems in the world but no system is perfect and every system is subject to a number of challenges.

“In terms of hospitalisation in ICU beds, there is often a week or two week lag.

“It means that the highest number of people in our intensive care wards are likely to present during the month of October.

“That is why we will be able to present in very good detail next week on all the preparation work that has been happening in the last 18 months to make sure that everyone can feel confident if they do need those services that they will get the best care possible on the planet as far as COVID and intensive care is concerned. We hope it doesn’t get to that.”

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