A senior medical advisor says NSW Health is trying to balance keeping businesses open while protecting the health of the public.
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On Wednesday, senior medical advisor for the NSW Health Public Health Response Branch Dr Jan Fizzell said not all businesses were being listed as venues of concern, as NSW Health were contacting managers and able to identify and contact everyone who had been in the building.
"That means that businesses are able to keep cooperating with NSW Health because we don't want to put their details out when we don't need to," Dr Fizzell said.
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"Say its the only supermarket in a town, we need to be really quite careful we don't accidentally close it because we're calling everyone a close contact whose been there.
"The other thing that can happen is there's actually no public health risk, the person went there before they were infectious.
"We do need to try and make sure businesses can stay in business whilst protecting public health."
She also said while people might be wondering why venues of concern were being listed later, she said this was because people were being complacent about getting tested.
"When people put off getting tested for a few days, that sets us back six, seven almost eight days sometimes before we can actually tell the other people they may have accidentally put at risk, that they could have a problem," she said.
"We do have to wait for those people to get tested, then we have to get those results back and we have to interview the case, then at the same time we get the result we see their QR check-in data, and that's when we can often reach out to people who are a high-risk venue or we can reach out to the venue itself."
On Wednesday, 2800 COVID-19 tests had been conducted in the Western NSW Local Health District, 1200 in Dubbo alone.
Dr Fizzell said more people need to get tested, even if they thought their symptoms were mild or allergies.
"The test tells us how much virus you've got in the back of your nose and throat at the time we take that test. It can change in 24 hours, it can change in a week," she said.
"I know its spring and allergies are about, but don't write it off as allergies."
She confirmed tests from people deemed more likely to be positive were given priority in getting their results back faster.
"When we know that the person is at high risk of testing positive because they're a known close contact, those specimens get put onto a priority run so we get those tests back first," Dr Fizzell said.
"Unfortunately when I've got a bag of 100 samples in it, I don't know which one of those is going to test positive first, so I just have to run that bag of 100 samples."
Dr Fizzell added often people who tested positive would know before NSW Health.
"We take it on truth that they've had that text message from the lab and that's when we start working with them immediately if we can," she said.
"We're still using the resources of Sydney, Newcastle, Wollongong to make sure tests in this area are acted on as quickly as possible so we do get those case interviews done within 24 hours which is a huge difference to what's happening in Sydney, where some people, if you're a household contact, we may not even interview you."
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