WA authorities have defended Perth's hotel quarantine system despite a security guard testing positive to COVID-19 amid criticism from the state's peak doctor's union.
Key points:
- Two investigations have been launched into the COVID infection
- Previous hotel quarantine system reviews did not identify problems
- How the hotel worker contracted COVID is not yet clear
After nearly 10 months with no community cases, a security guard in his twenties contracted COVID-19 after working at Sheraton Four Points in Perth, throwing the majority of the state's population into a five-day lockdown.
He was working on the same floor as a positive UK variant case and authorities now understand he caught that strain which is understood to be 50-70 per cent more transmissible than other strains.
"We don't know from which person in the hotel he acquired it from, so that's the further testing we are trying to work out," WA Premier Mark McGowan said today.
Questions over air conditioning
Authorities confirmed the Sheraton Four Points hotel was still being used as a quarantine facility, but said guests could remain confident in its safety.
Mr McGowan has assured people there was no risk from the hotel's air conditioning.
"The air conditioning is not a recycled system inside the hotel ... it vents to the atmosphere," he said.
"The advice we have is the air conditioning system is safe and there is no evidence that there is any problem with the air conditioning."
Police investigation underway
WA Police and health authorities have launched investigations into exactly how the man contracted the virus and where he went in the community.
The health review will be completed by former WA Chief Health Officer Tarun Weeramanthri and Australia's Chief Scientist Dr Alan Finkel.
WA Police Commissioner Chris Dawson said the police investigation would run in parallel and would be called Case 903, to mark the number of people who'd had the virus in WA.
"We need to establish very clearly not only what happened in the hotel but his movements, when, where and with whom," he said.
Prior to the security guard's infection, WA's hotel quarantine system had been reviewed three times.
"All these reviews found our system to be sound," Mr McGowan said.
Hotel guard was wearing PPE: Minister
Health Minister Roger Cook said it was clear something had gone wrong.
Loading"We will need to undertake an extensive inquiry into how he contracted it, it may be as a result of one of the new variants, it may be as a result of a failure or a gap in our systems," he said.
Mr Cook said it was unclear whether the man had contracted it from the positive case on his floor, or through another workplace interaction.
The minister said the man did not go into a room and had been wearing appropriate PPE.
AMA WA scathing of hotel quarantine
AMA WA president Dr Andrew Miller told ABC Radio Perth he was confident the rapid lockdown would bring the outbreak under control, but frontline workers wanted to see changes.
"What we hope this will be is the trigger for the government to actually open up the lines of communication with us and other frontline workers so we can fix it and prevent this from happening again," he said.
He said people were not being given adequate PPE, ventilation was not suitable, and daily saliva testing had taken too long to come into force.
"I think it's not a situation where we can just leave it to the government to say 'oh we'll look into it'," he said.
"I guarantee you they'll try and throw this guard under the bus, if there's one moment where he has let his mask slip off the side of his face, when in fact he's been put into a system which has set him up to fail."
Dr Miller said he wanted to see workers in full body PPE with gas-style masks, staff only working at one facility, better ventilation, and hotels completely shut off to the public while operating as a quarantine facility.
"Turn it into a proper quarantine facility — stop pretending this is a temporary problem that will go away," he said.
"It will happen again if we don't get up to speed."
Daily tests for workers took weeks to roll out
Western Australia has had a regime of weekly tests for quarantine workers for some time, and announced on January 8 that it would soon be undertaking daily saliva testing, following a National Cabinet meeting.
The daily system was tested in Perth's Novotel, but only rolled out to other quarantine hotels on Friday.
The infected security guard's last day of work at the Sheraton Four Points was on Wednesday.
Mr McGowan defended the fact the Government's daily coronavirus saliva testing regime for workers within the hotel quarantine system was not implemented until late last week.
"We decided to do that on January 8 [and] we managed to roll out the system on January 29," he said.
"Bear in mind it is a big exercise, that testing, and basically [involves] hundreds of people every single day.
"We put in place the saliva testing as quickly as we could, using the Health Department and appropriate protocols."
Second job concerns
The Premier said he had been advised the man may have been a driver for a rideshare company, but had not worked since his last day in the hotel on Wednesday.
"We're advised, and this is being carefully followed, that he did not do any other work in the time since," he said.
Mr McGowan was asked why WA had not learned lessons from Victoria, where a hotel quarantine inquiry showed guards working other jobs was a major flaw in the system.
"Working up the protocols around second jobs for security or cleaners or those sorts of things is difficult, because policing it and making sure people don't do a second job is hard," he said.
"But that's the work that has been going on now for a considerable period of time.
"It's not easy and all the states have struggled with this."
He said the state hoped to reach some sort of resolution by next week in relation to banning hotel quarantine staff from having second jobs.
"We can't lock people up who work in hotel quarantine. A second job is obviously something we will deal with, but it doesn't stop people living a life," Mr McGowan said.
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2021-02-01 07:31:00Z
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