Contact tracers investigate if quarantine worker spread Covid-19 virus between hotel guests

Queensland’s chief health officer has revealed a fully-vaccinated staff member could be the missing link into how Covid-19 transmitted between two people in hotel quarantine.

Queensland health authorities believe a fully vaccinated staff member “could have transmitted” Covid-19 between two guests staying on different floors at a Brisbane hotel quarantine facility.

Chief Health Officer Dr Jeannette Young said preliminary investigations into how a flight crew member became infected suggested a quarantine staff member was involved.

The woman who tested positive on Saturday, a flight attendant in her 30s who arrived from Portugal, contracted the virus from another airline crew member who arrived on a different flight and was staying on a separate floor of the hotel.

Genomic sequencing has linked the two together, and both have the Alpha strain.

Dr Young said a staff member had escorted a flight crew member from Mongolia, who had tested positive in the Four Points Hotel, to an ambulance.

The worker has then gone to the higher level of the hotel to swab the female crew member who was in quarantine.

“We are thinking, but we really need to do further investigation, that … that staff member has transferred the virus from the gentleman up to that lady from Portugal and that’s how that occurred,” Dr Young said.

“But this is very, very preliminary and we do need to look further into it before we can confirm that.

“This is a very infectious virus. This is the Alpha variant. We know that it can transmit fairly easily.”

Brisbane’s Four Points Hotel, where a female flight crew attendant is believed to have contracted the Covid-19 virus, while in hotel quarantine. Picture: David Clark.

“We’re looking at CCTV footage as we speak.”

Dr Young said the quarantine worker had escored the Covid-19 positive man to the ambulance at about 1.30pm and then the swab that was taken from the flight crew member was checked in to the laboratory for testing at 5pm.

“We’re trying now to look at whether we can narrow that down,” Dr Young said.

“But it would usually take several hours to get a swab from the hotel to a laboratory. The timeframes fit”.

The woman flight crew member returned three negative tests for COVID-19 while she was in hotel quarantine for 14 days, including on day 12.

She then tested positive as part of routine seven-day testing protocols of flight crew on Saturday within hours of leaving the Four Points Hotel.

Queensland has today recorded one new case of community transmission - man in his 60s who had been at the Portuguese Family Centre at the same time as the infected airline worker on Saturday night.

The woman tested positive on Saturday within hours of level the Four Points Hotel, where she had been in quarantine for 14 days.

She was out and about in the Brisbane community for about four hours while unknowingly infectious with the virus.

EARLIER: It came as earlier, Queensland health authorities were investigating whether a quarantine worker transmitted the Covid-19 virus from an infected person staying at Brisbane’s Four Points Hotel to another guest on a different floor.

Contact tracers suspect the worker has acted as an intermediary in spreading the virus from one hotel guest to another inside the quarantine facility “via an object or on themselves”, while not personally becoming infected.

But health sources say investigations are ongoing and it’s too early to definitively say how transmission occurred.

They believe airborne spread is unlikely.

Genomic sequencing yesterday confirmed a woman who spent four hours out and about in Brisbane at the weekend had the Alpha variant of the virus.

The sequence is identical to a cabin crew member who tested positive to SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes Covid-19, while staying on a separate floor of the same quarantine hotel.

The two guests are not believed to have had any direct contact with each other, flying into Brisbane on separate flights, but early indications suggest the virus was spread via surface contact – known as fomite transmission.

Brisbane’s Four Points Hotel in Mary Street, where a flight crew member is believed to have caught the Covid-19 virus from a guest staying on a separate floor. Picture: David Clark.

Infectious disease physician Paul Griffin said the virus could have spread when both guests touched “some kind of shared equipment”, such as during food delivery.

Speaking after national cabinet yesterday, Australia’s Chief Medical Officer Professor Paul Kelly speculated a hotel staff member may have transmitted the virus from one hotel floor to another, in what he suggested was a “world first”.

“It is unusual,” he said. “If I was a betting man, I would suggest that it has something to do with staff movement but that’s really a matter for Queensland to investigate,” he said.

Although hotel quarantine staff should all have received their Covid-19 vaccine shots, which protects them from serious illness if they are infected with the virus, they are still at risk of passing it on to someone else.

Four Points Hotel staff were being retested yesterday after the female flight crew member tested positive to the pandemic virus hours after leaving hotel quarantine at 9am on Saturday.

The woman spent between 4-4.30pm at the Brisbane Airport DFO, wandered around the Brisbane CBD from 5-6pm and then had dinner at the Portuguese Family Centre from 7-7.50pm, when she was contacted about her positive Covid-19 test and went to hospital.

Dr Young said anyone who had visited the DFO Cotton On store between 4.10-4.30pm on Saturday must self-quarantine and complete a Queensland Health online contact tracing form.

Associate Professor Griffin said the case would renew discussion about dedicated quarantine facilities.

“I think it’s something we should strongly consider,” he said.

“But we need to make sure we don’t think of it as a silver bullet. We still need to get our other mitigation strategies right.

“I don’t think we’re yet to fully utilize the mitigation strategies we have in place, having seen recently (in Sydney) people who weren’t vaccinated driving returned travellers, for example. There’s room for improvement.”

Prof Griffin said the best way for people to protect themselves, and others, against the virus was to have their two COVID-19 shots of vaccine.

“It’s highly effective and it’s something we can do quickly,” he said.

Dr Young said five more people had tested positive to the pandemic virus in the 24 hours to yesterday morning in Queensland, all of them detected in hotel quarantine.

Queensland still has 32 active cases of the virus.