Another day in Australia, another incompetent state government panicking and slamming down the iron fist of lockdowns, after its own mismanagement allows the Chinese virus to break forth once more.
Every major outbreak of the Wuhan plague in Australia can be traced back to a failure by government, from the Ruby Princess fiasco to the deadly farce of Victoria’s hotel quarantine disaster. Even as it slipped quietly into an elected dictatorship, Western Australia has so far managed to avoid a complete COVID cock-up.
That may all be about to change.
West Australians have been slapped into five days of hard lockdown after a security guard at a Perth quarantine hotel was allowed to mingle in the community for days after likely being infected with the highly contagious UK strain of the coronavirus.
In a story no doubt eerily familiar to New Zealanders, it turns out that government-run hotel quarantine was not exactly a stellar effort.
An immunocompromised woman staying in the same hotel that produced WA’s first local COVID-19 case in 10 months has warned the hotel is primed for more cases thanks to inadequate ventilation and poor PPE use[…]
“I kind of look down the hallway to look at the guards sitting on their phones and they will have their masks below their nose and hanging loose,” she said.
“And the workers are just not in the right PPE. They need to be protected too and it’s not that hard to hand out the proper masks and show them how to use them, they are wearing one anyway.”
I wonder if WA hired their guards over WhatsApp, like Victoria?
She also said the air in the hotel was being recirculated, a factor that Queensland health authorities believe could be the reason for the spread of COVID-19 cases from a returned traveller in the Grand Chancellor hotel in Brisbane in early January.
“If the hall or other rooms are being cleaned, the odour of cleaning products is strong in my room,” she said.
“If you want a Victoria-style recipe for disaster, this is it.”
Early into Ms Ardie’s stay she said she could also clearly hear a family in quarantine in the room next to hers through a shared door and at one point a man in the room was coughing so loudly through the night it would wake her up.
Insanity is said to be doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. It should surprise no one, I suppose, that governments are apparently barking mad. Why else would they persist with hotel quarantine schemes?
On Sunday Australian Medical Association President Andrew Miller said WA needed to up its quarantine standards by improving staff skills and ‘removing the hotel aspect of hotel quarantine’.
“Hotels are not designed to be quarantine facilities and they are not run in a way that will be effective at keeping COVID out of the community,” he said.
“We know that’s true because that’s what’s happened everywhere else, predictably that’s what’s happened here.
The Age
Meanwhile, even the WA government is quietly admitting another cock-up.
Daily testing of hotel quarantine workers, which could have identified WA’s first community transmission case of COVID-19 in nearly 10 months several days earlier, was only rolled out on Friday, Premier Mark McGowan has revealed.
Following a National Cabinet meeting on January 8 all states and territories agreed to roll out daily tests of hotel quarantine workers.
The Age
So, after agreeing to what would seem to be a priority public health measure, it took three more weeks for the WA government to get its act together.
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