If there’s been one constant in the Wuhan plague, it’s been the utter incompetence of so many governments and bureaucracies. The almost-unbroken rule is that the more authoritarian they’ve been, the more completely, disastrously, useless they’ve been.
Every time, “COVID dictators” have pursued policies that have made things worse, not better: from mass lockdowns to hotel quarantine. Especially hotel quarantine.
As even “COVID-free” New Zealand, a tiny population isolated and insulated at the end of the world, has shown. Hotel quarantine in New Zealand has seen a steady trickle of outbreaks, and of revelations of incompetence and malfeasance.
But the king of hotel quarantine disasters is undoubtedly Victoria. The clueless, authoritarian Andrews government’s complete cock-up of hotel quarantine led directly to 800 deaths and the state being placed under the sort of martial law never seen even in WWII. The economic cost of the outbreak exceeds the 90s recession: it was estimated to cost Australians $4bn a week.
If Victorians think that that’s all been fixed, that delusion is being rudely shattered.
Official incident reports detail hundreds of infection control breaches, operational blunders and defiant rule-breaking. Here is a small selection of those incidents, exactly as they were written by quarantine hotel staff.
Read the full list of hotel quarantine incident reports here.
Just some of the more egregious incidents illustrate how, once again, this is a top-down failure.
Matiu Bush, general manager of COVID-19 Quarantine Victoria’s Infection Prevention and Control program, refused to take a mandatory COVID test and breached infection control protocols. Despite being warned by health staff that e-cigarette mist could promote viral spread, a frontline medical officer defiantly vaped inside a quarantine hotel.
Then there was the airconditioning fiasco. Outside air running into the Parkroyal hotel at Melbourne Airport, where an outbreak happened in January, was switched off every night for 10 to 14 hours to “save energy” — in high summer. The stuffy conditions and contaminants, including viral particles, built up in rooms overnight, creating a transmission hazard.
Such penny-pinching stupidity is eerily reminiscent of the first, failed round of hotel quarantine, where untrained staff were hired via WhatsApp – and given “diversity and inclusion” training, but not PPE training.
The shortcomings of untrained staff were a major contributing factor to Victoria’s protracted second lockdown and curfew last year. Despite that abysmal precedent, infection prevention and control training remained limited for hotel quarantine staff this year. And surroundings were filthy — with dirty crockery, bags of rubbish, dirty carpet and smells from dirty nappies and food waste. The Andrews government’s direction that all staff with direct or indirect contact with returned travellers must be vaccinated was ignored. Unvaccinated contractors and tradies were allowed on site, heightening risks of the virus escaping into the community.
And – surprise, surprise! – Victorian officials lied. As should be familiar to Kiwi readers, government and bureaucrats tried to shift blame for their own stuff-ups by bullying innocent members of the public.
The documents also expose a misleading claim by officials. The Holiday Inn COVID outbreak that sparked the state’s third lockdown first escaped into a hotel corridor during the lengthy swabbing of an unmasked woman in an open doorway. It did not escape from the room of a man using a nebuliser, as senior officials originally claimed.
The lies didn’t stop there, though – and, once again, went right to the top.
Details of the confidential documents, published on Wednesday, make a mockery of Mr Andrews’ shameless boast in early February that Victoria had “higher standards” of hotel quarantining than NSW and other states.
The Australian
Two things emerge clearly from these revelations: hotels are absolutely not fit for purpose as quarantine facilities, and the Victorian government is a shameless lying gaggle of incompetents.
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