Coronavairus: Victorian contact tracers failed to find all of the infected

Victoria’s contact tracing unit ­failed to get in touch with a number of people who tested positive for the coronavirus.

Victorian Chief Health Officer Brett Sutton.

Victoria’s contact tracing unit ­failed to get in touch with a number of people who tested positive for the coronavirus at the height of the state’s second wave, an ­inquiry has heard.

COVID-19 Deputy Public Health Commander Clare Looker said on Monday that the ­Department of Health and Human Services unit stopped attempting to contact the positive cases after 28 days because they were unlikely to still be infections. She told a parliamentary ­inquiry scrutinising the state’s contact tracing regime that the “lost cases” were likely due to people providing the wrong phone number or because of human error when taking a ­patient’s ­details.

“We obviously continue to make obviously rigorous efforts to make contact up to a period of 28 days,” she said. “There are a small number of cases where we haven’t been able to make contact after that time, not recently, but during that most significant surge in case numbers.”

Victoria’s contact tracing regime has attracted national scrutiny after infection control breaches in the hotel quarantine program unleashed a second wave in the state that killed 800 people.

Chief Health Officer Brett Sutton told the inquiry that a lot of time was wasted on administration when the state was trying to obtain help from other jurisdictions. “In the same way when we called on other jurisdictions to support us in our contact tracing they needed to support us with paper-based systems,” he said.

“We were getting on the telephone and we were spending a lot of time through the administrative processes to get their ­additional support. That has been straightened out and it ran much more smoothly when South Australia went to multiple jurisdictions for support.

“If only we had been able to do that at the time but we hadn’t done enough of the ground work to have a kind of unified transition to that surge support across the country.”

Professor Sutton told the ­inquiry that at the height of the pandemic, the contact tracing unit were so overwhelmed it was unable to properly trace positive cases. “It’s true whenever the case numbers increase, in any jurisdiction in the world, you get to a point where you can’t effectively do all of the work for an individual case that you might otherwise do,” he said.

“When you get to 200 or more cases per day, it starts to really challenge your ability to get to all of that timely information for the close contacts.”

DHHS secretary Euan Wallace said the public health team chose not to engage Salesforce, a tech company that digitised the contact tracing system, when ­approached in March because it was focused on meeting immediate challenges.

“We had an operational system and decisions were made I think quite appropriately to improve and enhance the system because solutions would be delivered faster,” he said. “It was then in mid late June to July that we decided future enhancements were beyond the current (paper and digital) system (and) future enhancements would only be afforded by complete digitalisation end-to-end.”

A slide shown to the inquiry said moving to a digital system “reduces manual data entry and error”.