Daniel Andrews defends worker movement between quarantine hotels and aged care

Daniel Andrews defends worker movement between shifts at hotel quarantine and aged care amid the height of Victoria’s second wave.

Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews said “we‘re doing everything that we can to limit movement,” after a worker who tested positive for coronavirus had caught the virus at an aged care facility while working shifts there and at the Grand Chancellor quarantine hotel. Picture: Getty

Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews has defended the fact that a worker was allowed to move between shifts at hotel quarantine and aged care at the height of the state‘s second wave of coronavirus by saying the government couldn’t limit worker movement “100 per cent”.

The Department of Health and Human Services confirmed to The Australian late on Friday that a worker who tested positive for coronavirus between July 27 and the end of August had caught the virus at an aged care facility while working shifts there and at the Grand Chancellor quarantine hotel.

The Andrews government announced an inquiry into hotel quarantine on June 30, after coronavirus clusters later identified as the source of all of Victoria‘s second wave of the virus were identified in staff at two hotels in late May and June.

The DHHS confirmed to The Australian that a worker who tested positive for coronavirus between July 27 and the end of August had caught the virus at an aged care facility while working shifts there and at the Grand Chancellor quarantine hotel. Picture: NCA NewsWire / Tim Carrafa

Corrections Victoria staff replaced private security guards and the state stopped taking international arrivals in late June, but the Grand Chancellor and Brady hotels continued to be used to house vulnerable positive cases and close contacts, including many from housing commission towers, who were unable to safely isolate at home.

On August 2, Mr Andrews sent Victoria into Stage Four lockdown, shutting down entire industries to limit movement and suppress coronavirus transmission.

Asked why a government-subcontracted worker was allowed to move between hotel quarantine and aged care — now linked to 640 of the 787 deaths caused by Victoria‘s second wave of coronavirus — Mr Andrews said he was not sure whether the person had worked any shifts in aged care while infectious.

“I would need to come back to you in terms of further details about that particular case, but the key point here is … we‘re doing everything that we can to limit movement,” Mr Andrews said.

“Sometimes, you can‘t get 100 per cent. You can’t reduce that to zero. But the key point there is whether the person was infectious. I don’t have that detail.”

Challenged over the fact that the person was working in a government-subcontracted role, Mr Andrews said they had been working at a hotel “with no-one returning from overseas”.

Challenged over the fact that most of the people in the hotel were coronavirus-positive, Mr Andrews said it was “Emergency accommodation for people who have voluntarily decided, or taken up an offer to go and isolate, not in their home.”

“I don‘t have a timeline or a sequence about whether that person was infectious, but the program has been reset. That doesn’t happen overnight, and I dare say that in any workforce, there will always be, even despite some pretty concerted efforts, there may well be a very small number of people who for a period of time, not ongoing, but for a period of time, may have worked in their own transition period, if you like, their own reset, they may have worked at more than one place.”

Asked whether it had been reasonable for a government-subcontracted worker to be moving between two extremely vulnerable settings at a time when the government had stopped hundreds of thousands of other workers from going to work to limit the spread of the virus, Mr Andrews said: “Well I don‘t know how many times they did that. I don’t know whether they were infectious.”

“That‘s not a feature of the program now, weeks and months later,” he said.

“I don‘t have the file note in front of me, and I can’t give you any further information, but I wouldn’t make the point that you’re making.

“Hundreds of thousands of people were sent home, absolutely, and now 127,000 of them are back at work because of the decision we took to get the case numbers down.”

Asked whether there were now safeguards in place to prevent hotel quarantine workers from moving between vulnerable settings, Mr Andrews said: “That‘s my understanding,” adding that Attorney-General Jill Hennessy and Corrections Victoria Commissioner Emma Cassar had provided such assurances on Friday.

Asked why it had taken so long to put safeguards in place, given the worker was moving between hotel quarantine and aged care at least a month after he announced the hotel quarantine inquiry and more than two months after coronavirus clusters first emerged in hotel quarantine security guards, Mr Andrews said: “I don’t think it’s a recent thing. It’s been there for quite some time.”