Lush had been in Auckland for a meeting the week before last, "which didn’t pan out".
He had finished doing his broadcast slot about midnight on Thursday and about 1am on Friday went to Denny’s in Auckland and ordered a bacon, lettuce and tomato sandwich.
"Funnily enough it was really busy," he said yesterday.
He was embarrassed to say he had returned again in the morning for a second visit, the only two times he had ever visited the restaurant.
Before he left Auckland and before any announcement of a Covid-19 outbreak, he tempted fate with a comment he made to his producer.
"I said to my boss when I left ... ‘look I should be fine unless there’s a Covid outbreak in Denny’s’.
"Sure enough I got back down here [Bluff] and one of the first locations of interest was Denny’s at 1.20am, so it was hysterical."
He said immediately after finding out, he remembered a man who had been coughing in the confined space.
It was on about day five or six after visiting the restaurant he found out it was on the list of places visited by people who had the Covid-19 Delta variant.
As soon as he found out, he was tested at the Bluff Medical Centre.
His test came back negative, but he was now waiting to have a second test in about three days, at day 12, before he could head back to work.
Lush said he had been phoned daily by health workers who would reel off a long list of possible symptoms, none of which he had.
"They’ve been fantastic; each day they ring and text."
A manager of a Dunedin business who had staff members that visited a location of interest said some were finding isolating at home to be traumatic.
"It could possibly affect their health, but it is also affecting ... their living, but also their partner’s living."
Elsewhere around the South, Mitre 10 Mega branches in Oamaru and Queenstown both posted messages on Facebook confirming they had team members who visited the national awards dinner that had been named as a location of interest.
Both stores said the affected team members had been self-isolating and had received tests. — Additional reporting Andrew Marshall
