Culprits in hotel quarantine failure must be accountable

Victorians will be as pleased to see the back of stood-down quarantine hotel infection boss Matiu Bush, even for a month, as they will be angered by his irresponsible “f..k risk” attitude to infection control. Acting Police Minister Danny Pearson, who is in charge of Victoria’s hotel quarantine program, told parliament on Thursday that Mr Bush’s actions “did not constitute a significant breach” of infection prevention and control protocol. Mr Bush was stood down only after The Australian revealed he had been reported to authorities twice since March after refusing an Australian ­Defence Force request for a mandatory COVID-19 test and for breaching infection control ­protocols.

Questions also need to be asked about how and why Mr Bush got the position as infection control boss. In the year before his appointment, he criticised the healthcare sector for its risk-averse approach to infection control. In a 2019 interview about his charity One Good Street, Mr Bush said its “#f.ckrisk” slogan highlighted “that in healthcare we have become ­obsessed with risk and in doing so stifled creativity”.

Given the contagiousness of COVID-19, it is not creativity but attention to detail that quarantine programs need.

But Mr Bush is far from the only culprit in the ghastly litany of failures exposed by Ewin Hannan and Damon Johnston. Andrews government ministers have yet to step up and take responsibility for the dangerous sloppiness of quarantine control, as they must. As the Victorian opposition says, the government scapegoating the “nebuliser man” for the Holiday Inn outbreak that caused a five-day lockdown was an “absolute disgrace”. Incident reports show the infection first escaped into a hotel corridor during the lengthy swabbing of an unmasked woman in an open doorway.

The problems in Victoria’s system run far deeper than any individual or any one careless mistake, however. After last year’s hotel quarantine disaster, which resulted in the loss of 800 lives and more than 18,000 COVID cases, the Andrews government, especially the Premier and the responsible ministers, are culpable for the systemic failures in the early months of this year that resulted in another lockdown. Lack of staff training — an important issue highlighted in the Coate report — was one of the most glaring. As Hannan and Johnston report on Friday, a Victorian quarantine worker turned up for his first day on the job despite having no infection control and protection training. A confidential incident report reveals managers discovered that a new worker deployed to the Novotel Ibis on April 27 — three weeks after the resumption of the Andrews government’s troubled hotel program — was untrained only when he volunteered the fact after his induction. Incident reports obtained by The Australian also detail numerous cases of quarantine staff not wearing masks as they entered hotels such as the Pullman on Swanston, the Four Points Hotel, the Intercontinental, Stamford Plaza and Holiday Inn.

In December, retired judge Jennifer Coate’s report into last year’s hotel quarantine disasters involving private contractors singled out the importance of training and personal protective equipment. “It was not appropriate that the contracts placed responsibility for training and supervision, in relation to PPE and infection prevention and control, on the contractors in the manner they did,” the report says. “That should have been a responsibility that remained with the state as the architect of the Hotel Quarantine Program.” Each person working within a quarantine facility “should be appropriately trained in infection control requirements, PPE usage, physical distancing and hand hygiene”, Ms Coate recommended. She also underlined cleaning as being “particularly important to infection prevention and control measures … It requires experts to train and direct cleaning personnel, both with respect to areas to be cleaned, the standard to which areas must be cleaned, and the products and methods used to properly clean those areas.”

As well as detailing filth in some of the hotels, the COVID-19 Quarantine Victoria incident reports reveal that cleaning staff also were responsible for infection control breaches. At the Mantra Epping on April 27, a cleaner broke the rules by carrying rubbish from outside a room into a kitchen area.

This week’s revelations appear to have moved the Morrison government and Victoria closer to agreeing on a 500-bed, $200m purpose-built quarantine accommodation hub at Mickleham in Melbourne’s outer northwest. Such facilities are needed, and that would be an important advance, funded by the commonwealth and operated by Victoria. But that is no excuse for the haphazard failures of Victoria’s hotel quarantine operations, which have not been replicated in other states. Victoria has a way to go to show it can manage a dedicated quarantine facility properly.