Authorities have clamped down hard with a strict order after a factory worker’s diagnosis increased fears of an India-style disaster. Fiji health officials have issued a 56-hour stay-at-home order as the country rushes to trace contacts of a factory worker diagnosed with coronavirus.
The country has managed to avoid widespread transmission of COVID-19 for a year but is facing a potential disaster after a quarantine facility outbreak linked to the Indian variant.
The most recent community-transmitted case is a woman who worked with almost 900 people in a garment factory in Fiji’s capital Suva, with officials confirming only 300 have been tested so far. To trace the remaining workers as quickly as possible without risking further spread, officials have ordered more than 100,000 people in the city and surrounding areas to stay home and not leave for any reason over the weekend.
Suva entered a 14-day lockdown earlier this week.
Permanent Secretary for Health and Medical Services Dr. James Fong said: “We cannot waste another minute locating the rest of them,”
“To allow my teams to find these Fijians quickly, we will lock down the Suva and Nausori Containment zones from 2000 hours tonight until 0400 hours Monday morning.
“No one should leave their homes … I repeat it, within the lockdown zone, no one, not parents, not breadwinners, not children, no one should leave their homes.”
The cities of Nadi and Lautoka are also in lockdown.
According to the Fiji Times, there are 49 people in the nation with the virus, 28 of which are locally transmitted. On Tuesday, six new cases emerged in quarantine facilities in Nadi, the city home to Fiji’s international airport. The cluster began when a soldier contracted the virus at a quarantine facility and transmitted it to his wife, who then exposed up to 500 people at a “superspreader” funeral.
Mr. Fong said there was evidence that soldiers who had returned from overseas deployments had broken quarantine rules by mixing when they should have been in isolation.
“This is unacceptable,” he said, adding that the military was investigating what had happened.
Mr. Fong said events in India showed the threat posed by the strain could not be underestimated.
“We cannot let that nightmare happen in Fiji,” he said in a televised address. “We still have time to stop it, but a single misstep will bring about the same COVID tsunami that our friends in India, Brazil, South Africa, the United Kingdom, and the United States are enduring.”
Authorities on Tuesday banned inter-island travel, while national carrier Fiji Airways has suspended all international and domestic passenger flights.
Fiji has primarily contained the virus through strict isolation measures and border controls, recording 109 cases and just two deaths in a population of 930,000.
The emergence of community transmission is a blow to Fiji’s hopes of opening quarantine-free travel bubbles with Australia and New Zealand, both primary sources of international tourists, before the pandemic.
