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