Ballarat’s ‘weak positive’ case not transmissible

BALLARAT Health Services has provided an update on a potential COVID-19 case in the city.

BHS head of infectious diseases Raquel Cowan has said the “weak positive” test result probably wasn’t contagious to BHS staff, patients or the wider community.

“We’re still going around the absolute confirmatory process around that,” she said.

“We can actually say there wasn’t a risk to the BHS healthcare workers, or patients in the hospital at the time, or the community.”

With it not completely clear that the case wasn’t transmissible, Ms Cowan sought to explain what a weak positive detection meant.

“What we mean by a weak positive is that we’re looking at various target for the disease and there’s usually two to three targets for each test,” she said.

“One of those levels [in the Ballarat case] is up a little bit. There’s several reasons for that to be a weak positive.

“The first one can be there is a person with an early infection. The other thing that can happen is… that weak positive can be because they’ve previously had the disease.

“What we need to do is confirm they are true positive. There’s a couple of tests that we can do in the hospital ourselves, but… what we always need to do is regardless of whether test is a weak positive or a strong positive is actually get confirmation.”

With speculation in the community about the case, BHS CEO Dale Fraser said people should think about the person at the centre of the detection.

“Behind the speculation, the wild rumour, whatever, is a person who’s undergoing care and they deserve and should be expected to receive privacy for their care,” he said.

“We’re not a very large community, so clearly any wild speculations about the care of this individual or their medical conditions is detrimental to their health and our community’s health.

“We encourage everyone to be respectful of patients’ privacy. If this was you, you’d certainly expect that of yourself.”