reflecting what is happening worldwide and obviously an increasing number of
people are being diagnosed with the corona novel coronavirus what we are now
seeing in Sydney in New South Wales is a reflective of that situation as at last
Friday or Thursday we late last week we had just four people and of course
they'd all been discharged by the weekend that had increased to night and
earlier today and in fact only about an hour ago the premier announced the tenth
person to have been diagnosed with the virus and then I found dr. chant and the
health authorities advise me of the 11th I have just been advised of the 12th and
13th so we are seeing quite an escalation of diagnosis of the virus
having said that the people who have been diagnosed in the last little while
today in the latest pathology runs have all had a fairly positive position in a
sense that they were diagnosed in the in the early stages and obviously I just
preface this by saying this is all hot-off-the-press literally but we
believe that they first presented to their GPS and they were then I know that
they were then able to have their pathology those pathology results have
come through literally just in the last of the wall the people who we have had
this afternoon and I'll just give you a very brief summary that I'll pass to dr.
chance who will have some more things to say on this we had as we announced in
Parliament this afternoon as the premier announced a 39 year old gentleman who
came in from on the 28th of February and he came via
Kuala Lumpur and Singapore we have another male who's 53 years old and he
returned to Sydney from Singapore last Friday that's the 28th of February and
the two cases that have literally just been advised to us from pathology and
we're very very light on detail at this point but we will make that further
information available as soon as we can we have a female in her 60s who returned
to Sydney from South Korea and was diagnosed today we don't have full
details yet of when she returned to Sydney or what the flight details were
and the case number thirteen is a female also in her 60s who returned from Japan
and again was diagnosed today so we are seeing an escalating number of people
but can I say this and I say this very much to the community and brought
broadly who are coming back into Australia from some of the many now
hotspots around the world these people should be thanked and as the Health
Minister here in New South Wales and I'm sure with dr. chant we both thank them
for putting themselves forward when they recognized that they had certain
flu-like symptoms and they presented themselves to generally at the moment
general practitioners but in some cases they presented to hospitals some of the
early ones and that is absolutely critical New South Wales health indeed
the health systems around this country cannot do this job that we need to do
without a full partnership with the community members who are coming back
from these locations around the world that unfortunately do have
the there's a novel coronavirus so prevalent we do have some important
events coming up for some of the communities March 20th it's quite a
number of communities including the Iranian community the Azerbaijan
community and a quite a number of communities we'll be celebrating new
year and there will be large celebrations anticipated New South Wales
health will be working with the communities over the next week or so
just to work out how best to handle each of those events to make sure they can be
enjoyed but also done safely