Health authorities are preparing for rising numbers of new COVID-19 cases as the Fiji Centre for Disease Control comes back online, says Health Ministry permanent secretary Dr James Fong.
He made the comment after announcing four new cases on Sunday.
Dr Fong said they all stemmed from a cluster in Nadali, Nausori, and were believed to have started with a close contact case of the first Makoi cluster.
“The four individuals are all household contacts of case number 167 confirmed yesterday (Sunday),” said Dr Fong.
He said they were all entered isolation and registered positive test results.
Dr Fong said contact tracing had expanded to investigate the travel histories and potential contacts of the four individuals.
“We are prepared for rising numbers of new cases over the next two days (yesterday and today) as a high volume of swab results from primary and secondary contacts of existing cases are processed with Fiji CDC coming back online.”
Dr Fong said as of Sunday, Fiji had 49 active COVID-19 cases, four were border quarantine cases, 33 were local and 12 were classified as community transmission cases until proven otherwise.
He said there had been three recoveries as of Sunday. Fiji has had 172 cases in total, with 119 recoveries and 4 deaths.
