COVID escapes hotel quarantine for fourth time in a month

COVID-19 has broken out of Sydney hotel quarantine for a fourth time in just a month, as health authorities fight to keep on top of outbreaks.

COVID-19 has broken out of hotel quarantine for a fourth time in just a month, as health authorities in Victoria and NSW fight to keep on top of outbreaks.

The apparent ease with which the virus was passed from overseas travellers to quarantine drivers and other workers has officials worried about burgeoning infection numbers and future contagions by the mutant UK strain, B117.

The latest Sydney cluster, at Berala bottle shop BWS, sprung up five days before Christmas after a quarantine driver contracted the virus while transporting a family from a flight to a hotel.

The driver had taken precautions and worn a mask, but still became infected and then unknowingly spread it to a colleague who then visited BWS, Berala on December 20.

A BWS staffer caught the virus and passed it on to a another worker in the bottle shop, starting the BWS cluster which now numbers 15 with thousands told to get tested and isolate.

Another driver, working for Sydney Ground Transport, became infected while ferrying a flight crew in the second week of December and tested positive on December 16.

Between December 6 and 11, so called Avalon Patient Zero became infected and the Northern Beaches cluster centre in Avalon began.

Although NSW chief health officer Kerry Chant said Patient Zero has not yet been identified, genomic sequencing has revealed the Avalon strain is very similar to one contracted by a US traveller in hotel quarantine.

Berala BWS is at the centre one of the four breakouts by coronavirus from hotel quarantine in a month. Picture: Jenny Evans/Getty Images

A United Airlines crew member leaving the Novotel Hotel in Darling Harbour in December after a cleaner tested positive. Picture: Jenny Evans/Getty Images

The Avalon cluster stands at 148, and has infected people well beyond the Northern Beaches region.

The earliest breakout by coronavirus from hotel quarantine was on December 2, when a quarantine hotel cleaner at Novotel in Sydney’s Darling Harbour became infected.

The female cleaner, who travelled almost 40 km by train to and from her southwest Sydney home while infectious, worked four shifts across two quarantine sites, the Ibis Hotel and the nearby Novotel.

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Renowned biosecurity expert Professor Raina MacIntyre of the UNSW Kirby Institute said last year virus breakouts among workers were unsurprising and “hotel quarantine is a high-risk occupational setting for people who work there”.

“We’ve seen throughout the pandemic, we’ve seen breaches of different kinds and we can expect that, at times, things won’t flow smoothly and there’ll be problems,” Professor MacIntyre told Sky News.

“At the peak of the epidemic in Victoria, around July, the number of cases was so great they couldn’t keep up with the contact-tracing and there were delays in contact-tracing.”

A workers near the Ibis and Novotel hotels where a cleaner was the first of four quarantine infections of COVID-19 in a month. Picture: John Grainger.

COVID-19 testing at Auburn Community Health Care Centre Drive-through Clinic following the outbreak of the Berala cluster. Picture: Monique Harmer

“So for every case, there might’ve been 10 to 20 contacts, and so on a day when they were having 500 cases a day, there might’ve been 5,000 or 10,000 contacts to trace.

“You can imagine if you don’t get through all of those within 24 hours, you’re going to have a bigger and bigger backlog each day … in hotel quarantine, it’s different because you have a fixed number.”

Hotels in Sydney take about half of Australia’s hotel quarantine passengers.

As the Berala cluster grows and fears of further clusters develop, Dr Chant has urged Sydneysiders to get tested.

The mutant B117 strain which has appeared in Australia, is already in up to 20 countries, including the US, where it is predicted to tear through an already virus-ravaged nation.