The Murrumbidgee Local Health District has sought to placate concerns about the lack of available information on recent COVID cases in the Riverina.
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Over the past week, concerns have been raised over the new approach to how exposure sites are labelled and shared.
MLHD chief executive Jill Ludford has advised that this change reflected the shift to a "living with COVID" approach.
"We've come out of a very different environment where we were talking about the elimination of COVID cases during lockdown to now, where we're talking about living with COVID," Ms Ludford said.
"I think we need to move away from 'where did this case come from' and 'where did that case come from' because as we said, COVID will be all around us.
"We should instead focus on really getting people tested early, getting people into isolation and minimising clusters."
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"If you get an alert through your QR Code, all that means is you need to monitor carefully for symptoms; it means that there has been a COVID positive case in a venue where you were, but it does not mean you were a close contact or even a casual contact," Ms Ludford said.
Ganmain resident Molly Nelson, who is pregnant and lives in a home with her immuno-compromised husband and two-year-old son, said she was flooded with anxiety when she received one of the vague notifications.
"In the smaller areas like Wagga there are a lot of immuno-compromised people and to find out days after the fact and with next to no information was just scary and confusing," Mrs Nelson said.
"There's so much confusion and I just want it to be more transparent because we did not know what was going on or what we had to do."
Up to 26 new cases of COVID have been recorded in the MLHD, including 14 in the Albury LGA and eight in the Murray River LGA.
Wagga, Griffith, Greater Hume and Berrigan each recorded one new case.
Two more residents at the Mercy Place aged care home in Albury have died, including a man in his 70s and a woman aged 101.