Coronavirus: 16-hour wait for Victorian tracer contact

Restaurant named as an exposure site did not receive any communication from contact tracers until 16 hours after it had been publicly listed.

Mocha Jo’s Christo Christophidis and Lisa Slaughter. Picture: Aaron Francis

The owners of a restaurant named by Victoria’s Department of Health and Human Services as a coronavirus exposure site say they did not receive any communication from contact tracers until 16 hours after their business had been publicly listed by health authorities.

The delay in contacting the owners of Glen Waverley’s Mocha Jo’s restaurant in Melbourne’s southeast comes as ­numerous other businesses visited by what on Monday was 24 members of the Black Rock coronavirus cluster reported lengthy delays in hearing from DHHS after learning through the media their venues had been exposed.

A call from local state Labor MP Matt Fregon about 7:30pm last Wednesday first alerted business partners Lisa Slaughter and Christo Christophidis that Mocha Jo’s had been listed on the DHHS website as having been visited by someone with COVID-19 between 1pm and 5pm on December 28.

A flood of calls and emails then came rushing in from concerned regulars of the business, which employs 40 staff and ­usually has 2500 customers a week, as well as from suppliers and other locals all worried they may have been exposed.

During the course of the evening, Mr Fregon and the CEO of local Monash council Andi Diamond called to offer support and assistance, and Ms Slaughter says both were “flabbergasted” and tried to make inquiries through their own networks when they learned Mocha Jo’s was yet to receive a call from DHHS.

“We felt we needed to be on the front foot but we had no information to give anyone because we didn’t know what our exposure was,” Ms Slaughter said.

She and Mr Christophidis made the “obvious” call they would have to close on Thursday and Friday, and organised a deep clean of the premises.

Mr Christophidis tried to call the DHHS hotline on Thursday morning, but it was not until 11:30am — after Victorian Testing Commander Jeroen Weimar had listed Mocha Jo’s as an exposure site during his 10:30 media briefing — that the business received a call from a contact tracer.

It emerged that DHHS had tried to call Mocha Jo’s after hours on Wednesday night, before sending an email to a misspelled address, which never reached the business.

Ms Slaughter said she and Mr Christophidis had assumed the customer had dined in, due to the four-hour exposure period listed on the DHHS website, but it turned out the positive case had been there during a 15-minute window, with her husband; both were wearing masks and only the husband had ordered a coffee.

“She told me our staff didn’t need to be tested unless they had symptoms, even though most of them already had by then,” Ms Slaughter said.

“They also said they didn’t need any details of customers who were there at the time, even though we’d worked hard to do the right thing and collect all that information.

“It’s a completely different scenario to if they’d been in for a sit-down meal, but the damage had already been done from the listing and the fact that we didn’t know what to tell people for all that time.

“If we could have managed the message with the facts, we would have been in a massively different position. Our industry is so vulnerable at the moment, and we just can’t afford mismanagement like this from DHHS.”

Ms Slaughter said customer numbers had been down 75 per cent when the restaurant reopened over the weekend.