Daughter erupts over failure to ensure jabs for carers

Kathie Melocco is furious. Her 88-year-old father has just tested positive for Covid-19 after being infected in a Sydney aged-care home staffed by workers who still have not been vaccinated.

Residents wave from inside the SummitCare nursing home. Picture: NCA NewsWire/Bianca De Marchi

Kathie Melocco is furious.

Her 88-year-old father has just tested positive for Covid-19 after being infected in a Sydney aged-care home staffed by workers who still have not been vaccinated.

Her anger is palpable: “What we’re observing is that every damn system we’ve got is breaking down. Where the hell is Scott Morrison?”

Allan Patrick and his wife Lona, 87, share a room at the SummitCare aged-care centre in Baulkham Hills. Like most of the other 149 residents, both had been vaccinated with two doses of Pfizer and thought they were safe.

But at least two-thirds of the staff had not been vaccinated – and last week two of them were working at the facility while infectious.

On Saturday, Ms Melocco received a phone call saying her father was one of three residents of the facility who had tested positive, and though not showing any symptoms, was about to be transferred to Westmead Hospital.

“They got as far as the ambulance,” Ms Melocco says. “My sister and I refused to let them take him.”

It wasn’t that they objected to their dad being taken to hospital; it was that their mum wasn’t allowed to go with him.

“They haven’t been separated in 65 years – they were childhood sweethearts when they were 13,” Ms Melocco says. “My dad is blind and my mother has Parkinson’s and she can’t hear. They were terrified.”

On top of that, Mr Patrick has end stage kidney disease and is on dialysis three days a week.

“Mum’s test hasn’t come back yet, but they share a bed, so she may have it. If this is the end of their lives we want them to be together.”

Allan Patrick, 88, who has tested positive to Covid, with his wife Lona, 87. Picture: Supplied

By late on Saturday, Ms Melocco had won a reprieve on the transfer. But she wanted answers, chief among them: how was it possible that only 16 per cent of aged-care workers across the country have been fully vaccinated?

“It just seems extraordinary after all this time that aged-care workers are not all vaccinated,” she says.

Australia’s deputy chief medical officer Michael Kidd said on Sunday that authorities had reached “all but one of the 2566 residential aged-care facilities across the country” with two vaccine doses.

But two-thirds of aged care staff around the nation remain unvaccinated. Only one-third of the workforce have received one vaccine dose. Sixteen per cent – 43,000 out of 263,000 – have received a second vaccine dose.

The federal government last month announced a policy of mandatory vaccinations for residential aged-care workers with a deadline to vaccinate all workers in the sector with at least one vaccine dose by September.

Under existing rules, even the owners of the facility don’t know how many of their own staff had been vaccinated.

“We can’t impose vaccinations on staff and we can’t even ask them if they’ve been vaccinated,” a spokesperson for SummitCare told The Australian.

The facility is in full lockdown, with deep cleaning under way. The company has sent 70 per cent of staff into isolation due to close contact.

NSW chief health officer Kerry Chant said on Sunday there would be “continual cycles of testing at the facility for 14 days before we really understand the full impact in those settings”.

By Sunday afternoon, Ms Melocco had managed to negotiate a solution with NSW health authorities. Her father would go to hospital and her mother would go with him. But for Ms Melocco, the whole episode pointed to a failure by the Morrison Government to protect its most vulnerable citizens.

“It’s just not on. There needs to be some compassion given to our elderly - don’t treat them like this.”