Grant McArthur: Why hotel quarantine inquiry must go further than hotels
A probe into Melbourne’s troubled hotel quarantine system must also investigate why contact tracing didn’t stop the virus from passing from hotel security guards to their families, friends and the wider community, writes Grant McArthur.
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Stories of how bungling security guards were infected with coronavirus from the guests they were overseeing have spread faster than the virus itself.
An inquiry into Melbourne’s troubled quarantine system is trying to ascertain which of them are true.
But questions over Victoria’s management of COVID-19 must extend well beyond hotel checkout to examine contact tracing and efforts to halt the spread.
Just how was the virus able to pass from security guards to their families? Then to their friends? Dinner party guests and their homes? On to schools? And now businesses?
Contact tracing is supposed to stop this happening.
In the past few months Victoria has seen contact tracing at its most effective, and perhaps now at its most impotent.
During the state’s first coronavirus wave the health department’s contact tracing unit grew from 30 expert investigators to more than 1000 recruits by its peak in March.
They were able to quickly question all coronavirus-positive return travellers and immediately put them and their close contacts into isolation — stopping outbreaks before they got out of control.
Hotel quarantine was then introduced to stop COVID-19 returning. It failed, leaving the remaining team of tracers to pick up the pieces.
Somehow, those pieces were allowed to become too many and too widespread for any number of new recruits to play catch up and collect them all, creating a second coronavirus wave that threatens to become a tsunami.
At last count the contact tracing team grew to 2100 with the introduction of call centre staff, bankers and finally Defence Force personnel. Yet some of the 3147 active cases are waiting up to five days be interviewed — by which time the virus could have already jumped several generations and suburbs.
The system was so overrun by the end of last week details of 1000 people needing contact tracing were missing from the tracking computers.
That does not necessarily mean Victoria has botched the system though.
By its very nature contact tracing becomes less effective the bigger the outbreak. When it grows to an epidemic the job can be impossible and perhaps irrelevant — as Britain and other nations found when they abandoned the process altogether.
Rather than abandoning one of the most powerful tools to stop COVID-19, perhaps Victoria just needs to prioritise investigators’ efforts to areas where it can make a bigger difference.
Instead, all Victorians are being told through each day of questioning is there are no, or at least just a few, problems with contact tracing.
Like the quarantine hotels, questions about why private business has been called on to expand tracer numbers rather than interstate specialists or ADF are dismissed. Premier Daniel Andrews instead turns such queries into a defence of those battling through an overwhelming task.
Nobody is doubting the commitment and skills of the professional public health specialists. Rather, the questions centre on whether experts such as Victoria’s Chief Health Officer Brett Sutton were given the power and resources to get the job done before it became too big.
The inquiry must be allowed to also ask these questions.
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