A man who flew into Darwin has tested positive to coronavirus on Monday morning but he is “highly unlikely to be infectious”, the acting chief health officer Dr Charles Pain has said.

Health Minister Natasha Fyles told a press conference Monday afternoon the man in his 60s arrived on a flight from Brisbane on Saturday night but he was just transiting through from another city.
However Ms Fyles called his test result a “weak positive” and said the man had previously contracted COVID-19 in Victoria but had recovered and tested negative.

She said there had been a couple of week between him testing negative and travelling to the Northern Territory. Ms Fyles said he went into quarantine at Howard Springs from the flight and there was a very low risk to other people in quarantine there. She said he was not showing any symptoms.

“This is not another COVID test result for the Northern Territory,” she said.

“They technically don’t have coronavirus and they won’t be added to the NT case numbers.”

Ms Fyles said he was now in isolation in Royal Darwin Hospital.
Dr Pain said the test was not a false positive and it was not an unknown phenomenon with tests used now being more sensitive but the man was well.

“Every now and then you get cases of people who have been positive in the past and you get fragments of the virus remain. And they’re detected. It’s a weak positive, so what that means is it took a number of cycles of replication for it to turn positive,” he said.

“So it means it is a very weakly positive result, which means together with his history, because we know he was positive in the past, and then had been cleared and was negative, which means that is is highly unlikely to be a contagious case, an infectious case. However we treat him as if he is positive.”

He said generally after infection with coronavirus you are free of it after 14 days.

Dr Pain said he could not confirm if the man was wearing a mask on the plane but he said that was the usual process, while Ms Fyles said he had been sitting in a separate section of the plane from those not from hotspots.