In terms of what we know, we now have five cases that have been diagnosed in Australia.
They’ve all been diagnosed quickly.
They’re all in quarantine, one in the Northern Territory at the centre for national resistance and the other four in New South Wales.
What do we know about those cases? And it’s similar to travellers in other countries in the world, almost all of them directly linked with southern Africa – they are young.
They’re doubly vaccinated. Several of them have had infection previously, either known or on serological testing.
And they have very mild or in fact no disease. That’s what we know so far.
In terms of transmission on from those people, the only case we really know about is the one we talked about on Saturday in hotel quarantine in Hong Kong where there was someone who had come from southern Africa and transmitted to another person from another part of the world across the corridor. So we know it’s transmissible.
We don’t know still about the vaccine effectiveness. We don’t know about severity and there’s mixed reports on that from South Africa itself – and I would echo Minister Hunt’s view that this has been a difficult time for them and their neighbouring countries, one of which, Malawi, I worked in myself, so I feel for that country and I still have links to there.
It’s difficult but they’ve been extremely open and helpful in relation to what they know.