Permanent Secretary for Health Doctor James Fong confirmed last night that there are 11 new positive COVID-19 cases.
Ten of the new cases are from one household in Kinoya linked to the Extra Supermarket cluster.
He says the eleventh case is a work contact of case 206 from the Samabula cluster, who works for FICAC.
Ten cases were also announced after midday yesterday.
Doctor Fong says contact tracing investigations are ongoing and the public should expect to see the Ministry teams on the ground conducting these investigations throughout Suva.
He says though cases have not been detected in Lami, the public should also expect to see increased screening activities there in an effort to ramp up the community surveillance beyond the current known areas where cases have been found.
12 patients have recovered, which means there are now 108 active cases in isolation.
Fiji has had 259 cases in total, with 147 recoveries and 4 deaths, since the first case was reported on March 19th 2020.
Meanwhile results have been received from the remaining 4000 of the 11,000 total backlogged samples that were sent to two private laboratories in Melbourne, Australia, for testing.
There are zero positive results reported from these samples.
Doctor Fong says the reference lab, the Melbourne Diagnostic Unit Public Health Laboratory at the Doherty Institute, is now conducting verification of these results.
A total of 92,821 COVID-19 laboratory tests have been conducted since they started testing in early 2020.
10 new COVID-19 cases have been announced this afternoon - 3 cases are from Queen Elizabeth Barracks in Nabua, 1 from Tacirua, 3 from Muanikoso, 1 from Kinoya and 1 from Navosai in Narere.
QEB in Nabua has been under total lockdown after confirmation of the 3 cases.
Permanent Secretary for Health, Doctor James Fong says the 10th case has not yet been linked to any other cases at this early stage of the investigation.
The 10th case is a member of the Fiji Navy from Tacirua who presented to the Nuffield Health Centre in Tamavua with symptoms, where he was swabbed and tested positive.
Doctor Fong says this tenth case was identified through the community surveillance programme, which includes swabbing of people who present with symptoms to screening clinics or health centres.
He says depending on what their investigations reveal about this case, the Ministry may recommend extensions of health protection measures.
The Permanent Secretary says nine are contacts of earlier announced cases that were identified through ongoing contact tracing and screening investigations.
There are now 109 active cases in isolation, with the total number of cases recorded in Fiji since the first case in March 2020 now at 248.
He says they have had 135 recoveries and 4 deaths.
The Health Ministry has now conducted 585,709 screenings and 27,026 swabs through the community mobile screening program, in addition to screenings at health facilities and fixed screening clinics and the contact-tracing screenings conducted for positive cases.
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