Health authorities still investigating how Covid-19 Indian variant seeped out of hotel quarantine

There has been a new revelation from the investigation into how the Indian Covid-19 variant escaped hotel quarantine into Melbourne.

Health authorities are still investigating how the infamous Covid-19 Indian variant seeped into the Melbourne community from hotel quarantine.

It comes as Victoria recorded four mystery cases on Thursday – all from the same household – but contact tracers were scrambling to identify the source of acquisition.

Victorian contact tracers found a genomic link earlier this week between a returned traveller who entered the state’s hotel quarantine system on May 8 and the West Melbourne Delta cluster of 15 cases.

The traveller arrived from Sri Lanka on May 8 and tested positive that same day before being transferred from the Novotel Ibis quarantine hotel to the Holiday Inn health hotel May 14.

Health authorities are still investigating how the infamous Covid-19 Indian variant seeped into the Melbourne community from hotel quarantine. Picture: NCA NewsWire /David Crosling

Victorian deputy chief health officer Allen Cheng previously said “four main theories” on how the highly contagious Covid-19 Delta variant escaped hotel quarantine were being investigated.

The four theories were:

• The traveller infected, or was infected by someone on the flight to Melbourne;
• The traveller was still infectious after completing his hotel quarantine stay;
• The traveller transmitted the virus to a quarantine staff member;
• The traveller infected another resident in the hotel.

But on Thursday professor Cheng could not shed any further light on which theory was the exact cause.

“In terms of the first possibility, we have reviewed the testing of all the other 24 arrivals on the plane and we’re still reviewing details about ground crew who may have been on the plane after that flight had exited,” he said.

“We now feel that the second possibility is probably unlikely as he had been correctly cleared with positive serology.

“In terms of the last possibility, we’ve recontacted the 12 residents and tested most of them again, but noting that they’d all tested negative multiple times.

“So this leaves that third possibility, of staff.”

Victoria deputy chief health officer Professor Allen Cheng says there is still no link between the hotel quarantine case and the West Melbourne cluster. Picture: NCA NewsWire / Paul Jeffers

Professor Cheng said health authorities had cross-checked 268 staff at the Ibis Hotel and about 370 at the Holiday Inn, including health care workers, cleaners, hotel staff and Victoria Police officers.

“We’ve also checked their addresses to make sure that they don’t live anywhere near either of the two families (in the West Melbourne cluster),” he said.

“We’ve continued to look upstream of the two families and have tested their contacts, while there are still a few tests still to come back, we’re not coming up with a transmission path between this case in hotel quarantine and either of the families.

“While it’s the judgement of the public health team that we are in a position to ease restrictions, these new cases are really the strongest reminder that we are, by no means, out of the woods yet.”