Sloppy errors, single Covid case lock down two million

Locked down for five days over a single case of a mutant variant of COVID-19 that infected a quarantine security guard in his 20s, the people of Perth and its surrounds are entitled to feel West Australian Premier Mark McGowan has commandeered them into an alternative universe. They deserve support, as do the state’s contact tracers and other quarantine security guards. The last thing people need at an anxious time is the sort of vociferous derision Mr McGowan heaped on the Berejiklian government during Sydney’s northern beaches outbreak in December. On that occasion Mr McGowan, despite the outstanding record of the NSW contact tracing team, claimed our largest state seemed “to be engaging in a sort of form of whack-a-mole, they try and step on a gym here or a restaurant there. Rather than playing whack-a-mole, they need to kill all the moles”. Mr McGowan also advised his NSW counterpart, Gladys Berejiklian, to “look outside of NSW (to) what other states and territories are doing in order to crush and kill the virus … The idea that you tick along with the virus, and somehow that is a better model, is wrong”.

He was wrong. The NSW approach proved successful. Without hard lockdowns, Sydneysiders co-operated, taking sensible precautions to protect themselves, their families and their communities. At the same time, the city’s economy and society were able to function, with businesses remaining open and workers staying in their jobs.

What is seriously wrong in WA is that the state has failed to learn from and act on the hard, deadly lessons of last year, especially in Victoria. Elementary, sloppy mistakes in the west have been rampant, regrettably. As of Monday night, the state still had just a single case of COVID-19 — a guard from the Four Points by Sheraton in the Perth CBD. While the contagious UK variant of the virus has wreaked havoc overseas, it did not prove unusually contagious, fortunately, in Brisbane, which had a three-day lockdown under similar circumstances last month.

But, despite Mr McGowan’s harsh rhetoric and months of absurd, domestic border closures against the rest of the nation, his own systems, once tested, have fallen well short of what is needed to protect his citizens. As Paul Garvey reports on Tuesday, WA officials took several hours to inform the commonwealth and other states that they had detected community COVID-19 transmission, a ­possible breach of pandemic ­protocols. Despite confirming a positive test result at 3am AEDT (midnight on Saturday, Perth time), WA health officials told an Australian Health Protection Principal Committee meeting on Sunday morning that the state had not recorded any community infections.

The time taken to disclose the transmission is a sign of further strain on WA’s public health system, along with the failure to introduce safety protocols already in place in other states. In October, the McGowan government delivered a $1.2bn surplus. It would do well to invest some of it in its health system, the shortcomings of which contributed to the guard moving around Perth undetected for several days. As Victoria Laurie wrote on Sunday: “How could the hotel guard have contracted COVID-19 in a hotel quarantine site? How was he able to move around before his test result was known? Other questions are being asked about why Western Australia, with 10 months’ COVID-free grace, has not learned from quarantine gaffes in Victoria and Queensland by banning security guards from moonlighting in other jobs, especially ones that expose them to large groups.” The guard also worked as a ride-share driver. Hotel guards holding second jobs, Mr McGowan said on Monday, was “a complex issue … we are nearing a resolution … in the course of next week”. Better late than never, the state looks set to ban hotel quarantine workers from having a second job, which is likely to involve additional payments for hotel quarantine work.

The fiasco, justifiably, has prompted Australian Medical Association WA president Andrew Miller to describe the state’s quarantine system as “amateur and ridiculous”. The guard, Dr Miller said, had been “ working in a system that I believe didn’t provide him with enough PPE to protect him from the virus, that did not provide him with adequate ventilation and he was not getting daily testing”.

The lack of daily testing of hotel guards — a move agreed by national cabinet on January 8 — showed negligence and incompetence. Such testing has been in place in Victoria since December 7 and for some guards in NSW since December 14, where it was rolled out across the system in January. South Australia introduced it on January 8, followed a few days later by Queensland. WA’s weekly testing regime — the infected guard last tested negative on January 23 — was upgraded to daily saliva testing on Friday, January 29, Mr McGowan said on Sunday; too late.

Following his bombastic criticisms of NSW, Mr McGowan left himself little room to move in the event of an outbreak. In his hyperbolic style, Mr McGowan insisted “dramatic action immediately” was needed from the outset. It will come at a cost. Time will tell how far the virus has spread. But on the strength of a single case, confining Perth residents to their homes, apart from shopping for essentials and medicine, to access healthcare, to exercise for up to an hour a day or to go to work (wearing a mask) if they cannot work at home, amounts to extreme overkill. Other leaders have resisted emulating Mr McGowan’s penchant for doling out unwanted advice. In NSW, which is bearing the brunt of quarantining returning Australians, Ms Berejiklian said elimination was impossible while the nation was bringing Australians home. Zero community transmission needed to be the goal, risk had to be managed. Until effective vaccines bring the pandemic under control there is no room for complacency. More than 2.2 million people have died from among more than 103 million cases worldwide. But overreactions to a single case, or a handful of cases, do more harm than good.