Coronavirus: Suffering in border closure turmoil
Parents have been left indefinitely separated from young children and detainees say they were given no food for more than six hours when forced into hotel quarantine.
Parents have been left indefinitely separated from young children, and detainees, including a Type 1 diabetic, say they were not given food for more than six hours when Victorian authorities forced them to go into hotel quarantine after the New Year’s Day border closure with NSW.
The detainees are among 170 NSW returned travellers taken into hotel quarantine in Melbourne since Victoria first imposed restrictions on travellers from the northern beaches and Greater Sydney on December 18.
Of three separate individuals and a couple who spoke to The Australian on Sunday after being detained on Friday, none had yet had a temperature check or a coronavirus test despite being advised when they boarded their planes that both would be compulsory on arrival in Victoria.
Sydney couple Jennifer Papaconstuntinos, 42, and Clinton Hamence, 44, do not know when they will next see Ms Papaconstuntinos’s three sons Josiah, 14, Jaydon, 11, and Jacob, 7, who were left with Ms Papaconstuntinos’s mother for what they thought would 48 hours. The Australian is aware of at least two other families where young children have been left separated from parents due to the border closures.
The Australian is aware of at least two other families where young children have been left separated from parents due to the border closures.
“I’m my mum’s carer because she had an aneurysm a few years ago, so right now my Dad’s girlfriend is helping my mum until tomorrow, when (Dad’s girlfriend) goes back to work, and then I don’t know what we’re going to do,” Ms Papaconstuntinos told The Australian from her quarantine room at the Holiday Inn at Melbourne Airport.
Ms Papaconstuntinos and Mr Hamence admit they were naive in believing they could legally travel to Victoria on New Year’s Day ahead of a hard border closure at 11.59pm.
But they say no one told them when they boarded a plane in Sydney — on which airline staff were not even wearing masks — that they were likely to be taken into hotel quarantine and denied the opportunity to board an immediate return flight when they landed.
“I just wish someone in Sydney had said, ‘Do you guys know what you’re flying into?’ And if someone had made us aware of that we wouldn’t have got on the plane. No way,” Ms Papaconstuntinos said.
“We begged them to just let us jump on a return flight, but the DHHS authorised office just said, ‘No. You’re being detained’. There was no compassion. Nothing. He just screamed at us when we tried to argue.”
The pair had intended to make a flying visit to a Melbourne friend who Ms Papaconstuntinos said had been going through a hard time, before returning to Sydney on Sunday.
Like many Australians over the festive period, they had not been tuned into the news, although they had applied for and received what they believed were valid Victorian permits, and Mr Hamence did take the precaution of calling a staff member he knew at a Sydney radio station, who he says has since apologised for incorrectly advising him that he was “all sweet to go” to Melbourne.
On arrival in Melbourne shortly after 10am on New Year’s Day, a DHHS authorised officer herded the couple into an departure gate where they waited alongside others in similar situations until after 3pm.
They were offered bottles of water, but no food, and were told they weren’t allowed to go to the nearby toilet due to the risk they would spread coronavirus to other Victorians. Some desperate detainees were escorted to a designated quarantine toilet.
Despite the apparent coronavirus risk, and the fact that DHHS officers they dealt with wore layers of protective equipment, members of the public came and went in close proximity, with a teenager at one stage mistakenly sitting down amid the group in the belief that the area was an operational departure gate.
Eventually the group was taken onto a SkyBus, where again members of the public attempted to board, believing the bus was operating as a SkyBus, and where they waited for another hour and a half for luggage before eventually being taken to their hotel at about 5pm.
Ms Papaconstuntinos said they did not receive food until 7.15pm, having not eaten since they had breakfast ahead of their flight from Sydney.
Type 1 diabetic Ronnie Richards, 40, was on the same flight from Sydney and says he was offered a 40g bag of “white chocolate and caramel bites” on the bus more than five hours after he was first detained and only after he complained loudly and repeatedly about his health.
“It’s not exactly appropriate food for a diabetic. It was just unbelievable,” Mr Richards said.
Due to his condition, Mr Richards needs to eat and go to the toilet at regular intervals and carefully monitor his sugar intake or risk health consequences which can be life-threatening.
Mr Richards had travelled to Bondi over the Christmas period to visit his elderly mother, who has vascular dementia, but panicked when he heard of the border closure and boarded a plane, not realising he was likely to be detained at the other end.
“If I’d had any idea this would happen, I could have stayed in Sydney,” said Mr Richards, who lives in Elsternwick, in Melbourne’s southeast.
A handout detailing conditions of the Victorian detention says an authorised officer would conduct a review every 24 hours to determine whether “continued detention is reasonably necessary to eliminate or reduce serious risk to public health.”
None of the five detainees with whom The Australian spoke received any direct communication from an officer regarding any such review, although on Sunday afternoon a site manager told some of them DHHS was “in the process of setting up a process” for them to contest their quarantine.
“She acknowledged there had been ‘miscommunication’ and confusion and that when we were detained no review process was in place,” one detainee said.
Victorian testing commander Jeroen Weimar told a press conference on Sunday morning approximately 1500 people stranded in NSW had applied for exemptions to return to Victoria since the border closed at midnight on January 1.
“It will take us at least 24-48 hours to process those exemptions and we will deal with them in priority order,” Mr Weimar said.
Asked why people had been placed in hotel quarantine, Mr Weimar said: “We did see some people arrive in the last two days after the border closed, at Melbourne airport, and they were put into mandatory hotel quarantine, because there was no recourse for them to do anything else at that point in time.”
“I‘m very grateful to the number of people who have applied for an exemption, because then we can work with you individually to assess your situation and if there’s a genuine grounds to bring you back into the state in a safe way, we will support you to go and do that, but there has to be genuine hardship grounds, given that we’ve significantly inconvenienced 60,000 people who did the right thing and got home on time, and given that we have genuine concerns about the level of virus circulating currently in New South Wales,” Mr Weimar said.
Among those in Victorian hotel quarantine are people who have been in Sydney within the past 14 days, but who had moved to “green zone” areas of regional NSW more recently, having only intended to return to Victoria after being out of the “red zones” for more than 14 days.
These people rushed back to Victoria believing they were doing the right thing following the announcement of the border closure, only to find themselves detained due to their prior time in Sydney.
Asked whether she felt any empathy for such people, Acting Premier Jacinta Allan said the Andrews government had implemented a permit system for return travellers from NSW on December 18.
“This was clearly communicated at the time and since then by (Health) Minister Foley, by the public health team and others, and so that has been a circumstance that was in place at that time, and yes, we do acknowledge that on New Year’s Eve, the border for the rest of New South Wales was shut,” Ms Allan said.
“We had to move quickly because it was based on the health advice about what needed to be done to protect Victoria and keep Victoria COVID-safe.”
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