Coronavirus: abattoir blunder comes back to haunt Daniel Andrews

Victoria’s health authorities lost control of COVID-19 when they failed to contain the state’s largest cluster at Melbourne abattoir Cedar Meats.

Premier Daniel Andrews and Health Minister Jenny Mikakos address media at Treasury Theatre in Melbourne on Saturday. Picture: AAP

Victoria’s health authorities lost control of COVID-19 when they failed to contain the state’s largest cluster at Melbourne abattoir Cedar Meats, linked to 111 cases in workers and their close contacts but described by Health Minister Jenny Mikakos as having been handled “absolutely perfectly”.

It is no coincidence the city’s northern and western suburbs, where the virus has been spreading most rapidly in recent weeks, are the same areas where COVID-19 ran rampant among meatworkers in April and May.

In recent days, Premier Daniel Andrews and Chief Health Officer Brett Sutton have spoken of the challenges posed by family groups that do not heed health warnings, culturally and linguistically diverse communities where health messaging may not be well-understood, and casual workers with financial imperatives to attend work even if ill.

The government is now trying to address these issues with translators, engagement with multicultural groups and a $1500 “hardship payment”, announced on Saturday, for casual workers.

All this could have been mitigated if health authorities had been alert to these challenges and engaged in more thorough contact tracing as the state’s largest cluster emerged.

When the first known Cedar Meats case was detected on April 2, authorities took “at face value” the worker’s claim he had not attended work for four weeks.

Despite imposing rules that could see people arrested for leaving home or fined $1652 for going fishing alone, Victoria’s Health Department continues to maintain it could not check the worker’s claim with Cedar Meats “for privacy reasons”.

When a second positive case emerged more than three weeks later, authorities similarly accepted that worker’s claim he did not have any close contacts at work, even though he was working in a boning room with dozens of others, many of whom went on to test positive.

On the day the Cedar Meats cluster had been linked to 15 cases, the Andrews government refused to name the abattoir, despite naming a school linked to one inactive case.

Three Andrews government MPs offered condolence motions when Cedar Meats founder Samir Kairouz died in 2010.