Coronavirus: Elderly Ruby Princess passenger left with wife’s body in isolation for eight hours

Graeme Lake, 75, was distraught in calls to relatives as he waited by the bedside of his deceased wife on Sunday.

Graeme and Karla Lake. Picture: Supplied

A Vietnam veteran fighting COVID-19 sat with the body of his wife for more than eight hours after she succumbed to the virus at a Queensland hospital.

Graeme Lake, 75, was distraught in calls to relatives as he waited by the bedside of his deceased wife, Karla, on Sunday morning.

The couple were isolated together in an intensive care room at Caboolture Hospital when Mrs Lake, also 75, died at 2am.

“The alarms went off on all the stuff she was attached to,” Mrs Lake’s sister, Yvonne Cunningham, told The Australian on Monday.

“The nurses came in and recorded that she had passed. They didn’t remove her body from that room until eight hours later, at a quarter past 10.

“I spoke to him at 8 o’clock and he was distressed, and he still had to go through another two hours before they removed Karla.”

Caboolture resident Karla Lake, 75.

The Lakes contracted the virus aboard the now infamous Ruby Princess, with Ms Cunningham saying handling of both the cruise and her sister’s death raise serious questions about pandemic preparedness.

The couple caught a bus to Sydney’s airport, waited there for a couple of hours and then flew to Brisbane. They were picked up by Mrs Lake’s son, a mining engineer who is now self-isolating with his family.

Mrs Lake started feeling sick on her arrival in Brisbane. The next day she knew she had to go to hospital. Her husband fell ill days later, Ms Cunningham said. They had been on the cruise for Mrs Lake’s 75th birthday.

Mrs Lake told her sister she believed she was infected via a sick Ruby Princess cabin attendant who was “sniffling and sneezing”.

“From when they walked down the gangplank to when they got on the buses it was 20 minutes,” Mrs Cunningham said.

“We’re talking about a couple of thousand people. No Customs clearance, no biosecurity clearance, and in this very case no medical clearance with the pandemic having been declared.

“This is premeditated. They had all the buses there. The logistics to getting those people disembarked and on buses in 20 minutes, that’s a military exercise.”

Ms Cunningham, a horticulturalist, said nobody’s temperature was taken, “even though there had been suspected cases of COVID-19 on board”.

“If they had followed procedure and the temperatures of the people had been taken, I think they would have picked up that Karla had the virus. Because within 24 hours of her disembarking she was in Caboolture Hospital.

Cruise ship passengers disembark from the Ruby Princess at Circular Quay in Sydney on March 19. Picture: AAP

“If she had gone into a hospital two days ahead, her life could have been saved.

“Now we’ve got the exponential growth of COVID-19 in Australia because of the thousands of people that got off that ship without any quarantine whatsoever.

“No public servant can lift Customs law or biosecurity law. It’s not regulation that can be manipulated, these are written into our legislation.

“Somebody ignored that. They got those people off that boat so fast they didn’t know where they were. And then they allowed them to disburse throughout Australia.”

Revealing her sister spent her final days shuffling at least four times between hospital rooms, Ms Cunningham raised concerns about the level of preparedness in regional Australian hospitals given the expected spike in acute cases.

A doctor had told Mrs Lake to call her family because it was unlikely she would survive, and had even expressed surprise she was still there the day before she died.

“They anticipated her death. Yet they had made no arrangements for her body. That was very distressing.”