Coronavirus: Victoria Police warned department over security at quarantine hotel

Victoria Police alerted the state government to concerns over hotel quarantine security about a month before the breach responsible for most of Victoria’s second wave.

A quarantined guest walks out of the Pan Pacific in South Wharf, Melbourne, to go to a convenience store as a security guard, right, approaches.

Victoria Police alerted the state government to concerns over hotel quarantine security about a month before the infection control breach responsible for most of Victoria’s second-wave cases ­occurred.

In an email on April 15, Victoria Police Commander Tim Tully said the Department of Health and Human Services might need to “engage directly with security to address the immediate concerns before this becomes an issue in the media”.

It followed an incident in which a quarantined guest exited the Pan Pacific hotel in South Wharf and strolled down the Rona Walk walkway to go to a convenience store before he was stopped by a security guard.

The inquiry into the bungled scheme did not hold hearings on Monday but released the emails of Commander Tully, including images sent to Victoria Police of the guest leaving hotel quarantine by an employee of shopping centre group Vicinity Centres, which runs a Direct Factory Outlet in South Wharf.

“We have got the quarantined people again out this morning,” said the employee (name redacted). “One tried to enter a convenience store on site. You will see a guard from Pan Pacific restricting access to the site but allowing a pathology vehicle to enter.”

In another email on April 16, the Vicinity employee said: “They are still out and about exercising … Not too many this morning. We will continue to monitor but from my observation the exclusion zone is being poorly managed; we even saw what looked like someone with a takeaway coffee.”

The hotel quarantine inquiry has previously heard that 90 per cent of Victoria’s second-wave cases of COVID-19, which has killed more than 650 people, can be linked to one family that stayed at the Rydges on Swanston in mid-May.

Hours after receiving the first email, Commander Tully said a “security forum” needed to be scheduled as soon as possible and he would forward the images to state controller Chris Eagle, who was responsible for day-to-day operations of the program, and Pam Williams from DHHS.

In an email to Mr Eagle and Ms Williams on April 15, Commander Tully said he’d asked fellow Victoria Police officers to schedule a meeting with Unified Security, Wilson Security and MSS Security as soon as possible: “I have attached photographs that were forwarded directly to both Supt [redacted] and I today with a brief description of observations.”