Australia's chief medical officer has backtracked on a claim that hospital staff in northwest Tasmania, the centre of a COVID-19 outbreak, attended an illegal dinner party.
Two hospitals at Burnie were closed on Monday, with about 1200 staff and their families, up to 5000 people in total, told to quarantine for two weeks.
A cluster of more than 60 coronavirus cases, including 45 staff, has been linked to the facilities.
Professor Brendan Murphy, the country's chief medical officer, told a select committee of New Zealand MPs on Tuesday that Tasmania had a cluster of 49 cases at a hospital over the weekend and "most of them went to an illegal dinner party of medical workers, we think".
But he has since issued a clarification.
"This morning in discussions with a New Zealand Parliamentary Committee, I referred to suggestion that a dinner party may have been the source of some of the transmission in the North West Tasmania cluster of cases," Professor Murphy said in statement.
"Whilst this possibility had previously been mentioned to me following initial investigations, I am now informed that the contact tracing has not confirmed that such a dinner party occurred."
At a press conference shortly after Professor Murphy's original comments, Tasmanian Premier Peter Gutwein said that the chief medical officer was "speaking about a rumour".
