So I was at a Tier 2 COVID-19 exposure site in Altona North last week.
(Night time texts from DHHS? Not fun. Would not recommend.)
Screenshot of a text message received at 9:49pm that reads: “This is a message from the Victorian Department of Health. You are receiving this message because you have been identified as a Tier 2 contact of a person with confirmed coronavirus (COVID-19) after recently attending Woolworths Supermarket Millers Junction, Altona North. WHAT YOU SHOULD DO: Get tested for coronavirus immediately and quarantine until you get a negative result. For more information on testing sites please visit” and then there is a URL.
I immediately checked the Victorian Government’s coronavirus public exposure sites page for confirmation of exposure and, sure enough, the Woolworths at Millers Junction in Altona North was listed as a Tier 2 site.
The exposure period was on 13 August from 6:30 to 8:15pm.
Screenshot of a website entry for Woolworths Altona North. The exposure period for this site is 13/08/2021 6:30pm to 8:15pm. The health advice listed is “Tier 2 - get tested urgently and isolate until you have a negative result”.
I then checked my Google Maps timeline to confirm that I’d been there at the same time. And, indeed, I had been there from 7:47 to 8:46pm on that day to do our weekly grocery shop.
I’d checked-in via the Services Victoria app, which is how they’d traced me. (Thank you contact tracers!)
Screenshot of a Google Maps timeline for Fri, 13 Aug 2021 that shows two entries. The first is for driving. The second is for Woolworths on Millers Road in Altona North in Victoria, Australia from 7:47 to 8:46pm.
I got that text last night, so early this morning Nadia and I went for a drive-through COVID-19 test in Newport.
Lots of other people were there to get tested too so the the whole process took us two hours! But we got through it in the end.
Photo of a large white tent set up in a parking lot with several cars queued up to drive through the tent. The car this photo is taken from is waiting behind an orange traffic cone well behind the queue that's in front of the tent.
Now normally COVID-19 tests take 24-ish hours to process. But given I’d been mandated by the Department of Health to take this test, it looks like they expedited mine.
So just before 1am tonight I was told that my test had come back negative. Yay!
Screenshot of a text message that reads: “Dear Ameel, Test on 20/08/2021. Result: COVID-19 virus was NOT DETECTED. Test performed by Aust Clinical Labs. Plus do not reply to this text message.”
So, phew!
Of course I do our weekly shop, well, weekly. And in Newport (which is the suburb where I live) there’s a sizeable COVID-19 cluster. Which means there’s a good chance this’ll happen to me again.
Fortunately, I’m careful, I’m fully vaccinated, and I wear a good quality face mask so the likelihood of me actually getting infected and then falling very ill is tiny. But, still, it’s not fun to be reminded (and then be able to document) your close calls.