9th January 2022, Dr Chee L Khoo
You are considered a Close Contact if you are living with someone who has COVID-19, have spent 4 hours or longer with someone in a home or health or aged care environment since they developed COVID-19. You are supposed to follow Protocol 2 or 3 of the Federal government isolation protocol matrix depending on whether they have symptoms or not but the illustrated boxes provided is just too confusing for me.
Try this instead. See Figure 2.
Essentially, all close contacts must isolate for 7 days and need two swabs (PCR or RAT – whatever you can access) – one ASAP and another on Day 6 of the last day of contact. If either of the swabs are positive, you have contracted covid and your isolation period start counting again. Follow the protocol for someone who tested positive (see Figure 1).
If either or both the swabs test negative, you are released from isolation.
No contact or just casual contact
Nothing to do. Monitor for symptoms. Test if there are any symptoms. If test positive, follow Figure 1.
No known contact but unexpected positive RAT
Repeat RAT within 24 hours. If positive, need PCR to confirm. If negative the next day, consider the first positive as false positive.