Hotel quarantine inquiry: Nurses label program ‘shambolic’, ‘chaotic’
Discarded PPE gloves. A person threatening self-harm. Another found dead by apparent suicide. Day four of the hotel quarantine inquiry paints a picture far more disturbing than we could ever imagine.
Coronavirus
Don't miss out on the headlines from Coronavirus. Followed categories will be added to My News.
Analysis: Shambolic. Chaotic. Wildly inconsistent. Not safe.
These are the words of those on the frontline of the hotel quarantine fiasco — two nurses and a detained traveller who happens to be a leading human rights lawyer.
A detained guest who committed suicide in a quarantine hotel and who, according to rumours, heard by a nurse working at another hotel lay undiscovered in their room for days.
A person threatening self-harm who was told by a departmental official to stop threatening suicide as a means of getting a cigarette break.
Travellers kept in their rooms for 14 days without a single break for air. Even in prison, as quarantined guest and human rights lawyer Hugh de Kretser precisely pointed out, prisoners get at least an hour a day of fresh air under the UN-mandated Mandela rules.
Then there’s the infection control failures. A room at the COVID-riddled Rydges hotel which had supposedly been deep-cleaned, where discarded PPE gloves and masks were found on the floor.
A lack of personal protective equipment, no swabs for testing, too few nursing staff to manage hundreds of returned overseas travellers, an ever-changing rotation of senior managers and no-one obviously in charge.
Potentially-contaminated face masks disposed of in toilet bins. Security guards wearing the same gloves all day, while eating lunch, operating a communal coffee machine and handling their mobile phones.
An authorised officer using bare hands to shuffle paperwork handed over by 300 potentially infectious overseas travellers, then touching his face. Aside from infection control, the bureaucrats also failed the decency test.
A woman suffering severe pain for endometriosis was denied a kettle to provide hot water for her traditional Chinese medicine pain relief.
The reason? Bureaucrats said any electronic items to boil water would have to be “tested and tagged’’ before it went to her room.
In the end, a nurse ran over to a pharmacy at the airport and got the woman, who was sobbing in pain, some over-the-counter pain relief.
If there’s any doubt the Department of Health and Human Services is panicked about how it will look at the end of former judge Jennifer Coate’s inquiry, Thursday’s hearings made it clear.
Nurse Michael Tait gave evidence a quarantined person committed suicide at the Pan Pacific hotel in South Wharf, and their body not found for days.
Later in cross examination by DHHS barrister Claire Harris QC, he agreed the claim the body went undiscovered was a “rumour’’ he heard and didn’t know if it was true or not. But the inquiry muted his cross examination audio, so media (and anyone else watching on the live stream) did not know his evidence had gone from fact to hearsay.
The DHHS then phoned media outlets trying to get his evidence deleted on the basis it was “inaccurate testimony”.
No, it’s wasn’t. It was hearsay. That doesn’t mean it’s inaccurate.
Ms Harris told the inquiry “it has been established to be false, incorrect, not based on anything other than rumours’’.
No, the inquiry does not know that it is false or incorrect. No evidence has been led to disprove his claim. And Ms Harris arguing a welfare check at 4pm the day before the person apparently took their own life doesn’t address what happened after.
It’s early days, but the DHHS as an organisation is already being shown to be incompetent and unfeeling.
For urgent support call Lifeline: 13 11 14
MORE NEWS
HOTEL QUARANTINE ‘SHAMBOLIC’, ‘CHAOTIC’