N.L. reporting 3 new cases of COVID-19

Newfoundland and Labrador reported threenew cases of COVID-19 on Thursday, one apiece in three health regions on the island, marking 24 new cases in the past 10 days.

The province has 28 active cases.

The first new case is a manin the Central Health region between 20 and 39 years old.

In a media release the Department of Health said the case is travel-related.The man is not a resident of Newfoundland and Labrador, and travelled to the province from Nova Scotia prior to the closure of the Atlantic bubble.

The Department of Health said this case is not related to a previous known case.

Because of this case the Department of Health is asking passengers who travelled on Air Canada Flight 8862 from Halifax to Gander, which arrived onFriday,to call 811 to arrange COVID-19 testing.

Public health is encouraging all passengers to continue monitoring themselves for symptoms for 14 days from the time of their arrival in the province, even if they have received a negative test result.

The second newcase on Thursday is a womanin the Eastern Health region between 20 and 39 years old.

That case is travel-related. The Department of Health said the woman is a resident of Newfoundland and Labrador whoarrived in the province from East Africa.

The third new case is a womanin the Western Health region under 19 years old.

The woman isa resident of Newfoundland and Labrador,is a close contact of a previouscase and is related to the recent cluster in the Western Health region.

In an emailedstatement to CBC News the Health Department said the woman has beenin quarantine throughout the infectious period and is not connected to a previous case found in a student at Elwood Elementary in Deer Lake.

"The individual poses no risk to the public. This case was not related to the previous school related case. There has been no transmission within the school environment to date," reads the statement.

The Department of Health said each person in these cases is self-isolatingand contact tracing is underway.

In total, 60,578people have been tested for the virus since March, an increase of 379 in the last 24 hours.

The province's total number of cases is now 327.

There have been 295recoveries and four deaths since March.There is no one in hospital due to the virus.

Evaluating the Atlantic bubble

On Thursday, Dr. Proton Rahman said the province is seeing roughly two new cases a day related to travelling, which is a reflection of a surge of COVID-19 in other places across Canada.

Rahman, a clinical scientist in the Faculty of Medicine at Memorial University, leadsthe provincial COVID-19 modelling team that reports to the Department of Health and Community Services.

On Wednesday, Newfoundland and Labrador effectively left the Atlantic bubble for at least the next two weeks.

Rahman said for the province to return to the bubble, public health officials haveto monitor Newfoundland and Labrador's own epidemiologyand if there is any community spread at this point there is none and also monitor the rest of the Atlantic region, where there hasbeencommunity spread.

"We're still having people come in from high areas of infection. How we handle that is really important, and if it's not in our community then we're actually doing really, really well," Rahman told CBC Radio's St. John's Morning Show.

"How they handle that in Halifax is very important in terms of determining whether we are a bubble within a bubble. So there's two different things that we sort of have to evaluate. There's things we can do, and there's things we are hoping that Nova Scotia can do for us to rejoin the bubble."

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