Australian Open hotel quarantine worker confirmed as having UK strain

Victorian health authorities have confirmed the coronavirus strain that escaped hotel quarantine in Melbourne is the highly contagious UK variant.

The coronavirus strain that escaped hotel quarantine in Melbourne after a worker tested positive had been confirmed as the highly contagious UK variant.

Victoria’s chief health officer Brett Sutton said on Friday morning genomic sequencing had confirmed the worker had contracted the B.1.1.7 mutant strain of COVID-19.

The 26-year-old man from Noble Park, who was working for the Australian Open quarantine program, returned a positive COVID-19 test result on Wednesday.

“That’s the variant that was first identified in the UK, it is a more transmissible variant of concern,” Professor Sutton said.

“We’ve always worked on the assumption that it was going to be this variant.

“That’s because four of the six residents who’d tested positive at the hotel had that variant identified in them.”

Prof Sutton said who exactly the man had got the virus from was still to be determined.

“We probably can’t say definitively whether it was one of those individuals out of the six positives,” he said.

The Australian Open quarantine worker who tested positive was stationed at the Grand Hyatt hotel in Melbourne. Picture: David Gray/AFP

“We do need to marry-up that genomics information with the epidemiological information.

“So the CCTV footage, the interviews, to really understand how transmission might have occurred.

“We’re confident at the moment it’s not been picked up in the community but from one of the residents in the hotel.”

The worker doesn’t appear to have spread the virus with 16 of the man’s 17 social and household contacts testing negative. The final result is expected on Friday.

Prof Sutton maintained there was no apparent breach of infection prevention and control protocols, or PPE, but health officials would re-examine what took place at Grand Hyatt Hotel.

Tennis players and officials arriving at the Grand Hyatt hotel for a two-week quarantine period ahead of the Australian Open tennis tournament. Picture: William West/AFP

He said droplet spread was managed using PPE and 1.5m social distancing but airborne spread, through aerosolised particles, could move even further than that.

“Airborne transmission is probably more likely with variants of concern, it has always been a possibility, but it’s going to be a bigger risk factor going forward,” Prof Sutton said.

Premier Daniel Andrews said authorities had “spared not effort” to try and run the outbreak into the ground.

People queue to get tested for COVID at a Monash Health clinic on Cleeland Street, Dandenong. Picture: NCA NewsWire / Andrew Henshaw

“It’s very clear the risk we face now is very different to what is was a month ago or six months ago,” Mr Andrews said.

Victoria has recorded no new local cases since the man tested positive from more than 22,500 tests.

The health department confirmed three new cases were recorded on Friday morning, all in returned travellers in hotel quarantine.

Victoria’s COVID-19 response commander Jeroen Weimar said more than 1500 people had been identified as contacts of the infected worker.

He said 299 people had been identified as close contacts from the 14 exposure sites and were getting tested and isolating for 14 days.

A further 743 had been identified as workplace contacts and 507 players and officials involved in the Australian Open had also been tested.

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