Perth quarantine hotel guards ‘don’t wear masks in hallways’

A guest at the quarantine hotel behind Perth’s latest COVID outbreak says he has seen guards not wearing masks when in hallways outside the rooms of quarantined guests.

Tracey Morris gives the jab to WA Premier Mark McGowan. Picture: Colin Murty

A guest at the quarantine hotel behind Perth’s latest COVID outbreak says he has seen guards not wearing masks when in hallways outside the rooms of quarantined guests, as the second COVID outbreak in as many weeks from one of Western Australia’s quarantine hotels again intensified scrutiny on the system.

The Australian Medical Association once more clashed with the government over its administration of hotel quarantine, calling for guards to be given added protection against airborne spread.

WA Premier Mark McGowan on Monday said while authorities were still working to determine how a security guard at the Pan Pacific quarantine hotel contracted the virus, they had ruled out the hotel’s ventilation system as the cause.

The government has also said the guard in question was following all requirements and wearing both a mask and a face shield when he contracted the virus.

The latest guard to contract the virus has passed it on to two of his housemates. Those two also worked as food delivery drivers while potentially infectious, visiting more than 70 different restaurants and delivering food to 100 different homes, but authorities say those visits presented a low risk to public health.

While the government continues to investigate the latest Pan Pacific outbreak, one guest, who did not want to be named because he is still in quarantine and will need to quarantine again in the future, told The Australian he had seen a guard as recently as Sunday in the hallway outside his room without a face mask.

The man has now done several stints in quarantine — he works at an overseas mine so has travelled from and to Australia numerous times in the past year — and was also a guest at another quarantine hotel in January when one of the guards there contracted the virus, triggering a five-day lockdown of Perth.

The man said there had been little improvement in precautions taken by guards over the past few months, and he had expected to see the emergence of cases linked to security guards. In one instance, he said, a security guard who visited his room to complain about noise was not wearing any PPE when he opened his door.

“I’m not surprised by the latest case at all,” he said. “Most of the guys who work with me have all had similar experiences.”

He said the frequency with which he and colleagues saw guards not complying with mask requirements was of concern.

While precautions were high when new guests arrived at each hotel, the standards seemed to drop in the subsequent days.

“They’re pretty blase when you get to the (quarantine) floors,” he said. “On the first day, in everyone is doing the right thing but after that you see it drop off.”

Mr McGowan said a review of CCTV had shown that the latest guard to contract COVID had not done anything out of the ordinary while working at the hotel, and rules were in place to reduce the risks of guards and other hotel staff contracting the virus.

“The rules are there. We’ve done all sorts of things in terms of training, in terms of preventing second jobs, in terms of vaccination, in terms of daily testing of security guards,” he said.

“The regime is extraordinary when you think about it.”

AMA WA president Andrew Miller said the government had not always shown a willingness to make changes to the system when problems were identified, and has called for an overhaul of both the system and the personnel running it: “The government’s response to issues raised with quarantine has been defensive and secretive and obstructive.”