Susie O’Brien: Victoria's hard-earned freedoms depend on getting hotel quarantine right

The past few days have shown we’ll need more than just good luck to successfully handle hotel quarantine, writes Susie O’Brien.

International aircraft arrive at Melbourne Airport. Picture: Ian Currie/NCA NewsWire.

After months of closed borders, Victoria’s first international flight touched down on Monday.

It was a plane with 253 people coming from Colombo in Sri Lanka.

We’ve had 38 days with no cases and no community transmission in this state, but we’ve now got hundreds of people a day arriving from countries with high numbers of infections.

These include Sir Lanka with 27,000 cases, Japan with 28,000, Qatar with 2700 and the Philippines with 31,000.

It’s about time we opened up our international borders. After so long, Australians stranded overseas deserve to come home.

But these arrivals expose us to much higher risks than we’ve faced in the past six months.

This means officials have more responsibility than ever before to perfect our screening, testing, quarantine and contract tracing processes.

Our security, economy and sanity depend on it.

The international arrivals system has already been put to the test, with two German nationals allowed to skip quarantine in Sydney and get on a flight to Melbourne.

It follows an earlier breach of 55 arrivals from New Zealand to Victoria in October.

Despite the best intentions, these cases show we can’t trust authorities in other places to get it right every single time.

The onus, therefore, is on our officials to have the highest possible standards.

We must get it right ourselves every single time. We can’t rely on good luck or the tenacity of isolated individuals.

After all, the two Germans were let through by an inexperienced NSW police officer, and only picked up by a savvy security guard who overheard them chatting at the airport.

This led to at least 200 people being close contacts of two people who could have had the coronavirus. It was a very real possibility given the 327,000 active cases of the virus in Germany right now.

Hotel quarantine restarted in Melbourne on Monday. Picture: Ian Currie/NCA NewsWire.

And yet evidence from one of these close contacts suggests DHHS is already struggling to manage contract tracing linked to just two cases — let along dozens or hundreds.

One of the passengers on the flight from Sydney to Melbourne was KIIS DJ Jase Hawkins.

The flight landed at 1.45pm on Saturday, and the Germans were discovered soon after. And yet DHHS only went public at 10pm that night.

Hawkins says he only found out close to midnight when he received a text. He’d had hours since being on the plane to go out and mix freely with others. Luckily, he stayed home with his young family instead.

Why did it take DHHS so long to get in touch with people on that plane given that they would have easily obtained their contact information?

The text told Hawkins to self-quarantine and call the department for more information.

Although it was late, Hawkins spent 45 minutes trying to speak to someone at the department.

He got put through to a nurse but she didn’t know anything about it.

He tried again and couldn’t get through.

Then he rang the national hotline and eventually “got on to someone who was sort of aware of the situation”.

But the best they could do was tell him to “follow the advice on the website”.

What did the website say? That people should contact the department.

When Hawkins finally spoke to spoke to someone who know what was going on, it was 2pm on Sunday. They told him they were “just sort of catching up on this”.

It’s not good enough.

Twenty-four hours before our state was due to accept international arrivals, and Hawkins was getting more information from the media than health officials.

It doesn’t bode well for the next few months, does it?

In Victoria we’ve had case after case of people who are close contacts of people with COVID waiting days to be rung by DHHS, or given incorrect details or conflicting advice. It’s all very well for Police Minister Lisa Neville to say she will take full responsibility for any bungle in the state’s new hotel quarantine system.

But by then it would be too late. It’s just a matter of time before covid-positive people enter our state and we can’t afford any more delays, confusion or mistakes.

The incident also highlighted the fact that exemptions exist, allowing some people to be isolated at home instead of in hotel quarantine. These include people on government business, consular staff and international aircrew.

Premier Dan Andrews has already said there would “always be some risk”, but waiting 24 hours to give close contacts of suspected cases informed advice is not risky, it’s crazy.

Susie O’Brien is a Herald Sun columnist

@susieob