Pharmacy Daily | COVID scares hit Bourke and Guild

PHARMACY Guild of Australia NSW Branch President, David Heffernan, has received the all-clear after being tested for COVID-19 after attending a dinner alongside State Agriculture Minister, Adam Marshall, who tested positive for the virus.

Heffernan travelled to Canberra on Wed and dined with National Party MP and Federal Minister for Resources, Keith Pitt.

Speaking to Seven News, the Guild leader said that after being identified as a close contact of Marshall, he had "tried to advise as many people as I can", adding that he had "no symptoms" and felt "perfectly fine, perfectly health".

In a tweet posted this afternoon, Heffernan said he had just been contacted by NSW Health.

"Negative. No symptoms," he said.

"To be prudent, I should note I am required to [have] COVID test[s] on day seven and day 12."

Meanwhile NSW Health has reported that its ongoing sewage surveillance program has detected fragments of the virus at the Bourke sewage treatment plant in the State's west.

Bourke pharmacist, Peter Crothers, told Pharmacy Daily that he had spoken to local authorities and said he would be implementing COVIDSafe measures across his pharmacy, following the NSW Health announcement.

"We always knew that this sort of thing might happen," he said.

"At the recommendation of our local authorities we're going back to full social distancing.

"We'll probably put some limits on the number of people that can be in the pharmacy - we've got a large shopping space, but the way store traffic works we can't have dozens of people in at a time.

"We'll be having people wait outside the store at 1.5 or two metre intervals, which is something we did early on [in the pandemic], so we're just returning to those early days a year or more ago.

"We had already decided that we would start using the Service NSW QR code check-in - that hasn't been compulsory and it still isn't for pharmacies.

"We started to implement that a few weeks ago to get people used to it, just in case the was an outbreak."

However, Crothers noted that the store was also operating a manual check-in record, as a significant number of people in the area do not have smartphones.