West Australian hotel quarantine guards not required to wear masks full time

Security guards working in Perth hotel quarantine have not been ­required to wear masks despite being near infectious returned travellers, West Australian health officials have admitted.

People line up for COVID-19 tests in Maylands, Perth, the origin of the latest outbreak, on Tuesday. Picture: Tony McDonough

Security guards working in Perth hotel quarantine have not been ­required to wear masks despite being near infectious returned travellers, West Australian health officials have admitted.

It is the latest weakness in the state’s coronavirus health ­response to emerge after one ­security guard who caught COVID-19 last week plunged the city into a five-day lockdown.

Premier Mark McGowan on Tuesday said Perth’s two million residents would remain under lockdown until at least Friday ­despite no new cases being ­recorded for a second day in a row.

“I know that is debilitating and difficult,” Mr McGowan said. “I know shopping centres are empty, the malls are empty. I know a lot of people are suffering.

“But I don’t want to see a recurrence … Britain kept coming out of lockdown too early and then the virus would re-erupt.”

But Mr McGowan and Health Minister Roger Cook were forced to defend the integrity of the state’s coronavirus response after confirming a report in The Australian that officials did not tell the commonwealth and other states about the security guard infection for more than 11 hours and despite the Australian Health Protection Principal Committee convening hours after the test result.

Mark McGowan. Picture: Tony McDonough

Mr Cook defended the state’s decision not to inform Sunday morning’s AHPPC meeting of the latest infection, despite the positive test being recorded at midnight on Saturday.

He said the lack of disclosure at that time was consistent with health protocols. “At that point in time we were still getting all of the facts,” he said. “The Chief Medical Officer hadn’t had the opportunity to brief the Premier at that point. Obviously we had a positive test, we knew about it, but we didn’t know the details.”

Police investigating how the guard contracted the virus have now established the man delivered medication to a quarantined person infected with the highly contagious British strain of the virus.

But Mr Cook said it was unclear whether the guard was wearing a mask when making that delivery.

“Security guards or any personnel in a hotel quarantine don’t need to wear masks at every point of that building and at every point to carry out their duties,” he said.

“There are particular circumstances in which they are required to wear PPE … at other times they may not be.”

The McGowan government has already been criticised by the Australian Medical Association and others for its quarantine ­arrangements, including for only having introduced daily saliva-based testing of security guards from Friday, weeks after all other states implemented that measure.

Mr McGowan said the state’s quarantine system had done well to protect the state for almost a year, but acknowledged that its system was not perfect.

“There’s no magic system, there’s no perfect system,” he said. “We are dealing with people, working in an environment that’s 24 hours a day, nine hotels, for a whole year, and dealing with tens of thousands of potentially positive people.”

The five-day lockdown has led to concerns from business groups about a severe financial impact, with Chamber of Commerce and Industry chief economist Aaron Morey warning the retail and hospitality sectors were most likely to feel a major hit.

Mr McGowan said the government was weighing up financial assistance to businesses hit by the lockdown, expected to be announced this week.

A near-deserted Barrack Street in central Perth. Picture: Philip Gostelow

Mr Morey said booming conditions in the resources sector and the ongoing JobKeeper support for prequalified businesses would mask the full impact the lockdown was having elsewhere.

“Those fundamental forces that underpinned us in 2020 are still there, but there are still those acute impacts on small businesses in particular that will really struggle,” Mr Morey said.

Businesses suffering as a result of the lockdown won’t be able to access JobKeeper assistance, given they needed to qualify for the final few months of the scheme on the back of their December quarter earnings.

Commonwealth Bank associate economist Nicolas Guesnon, in a note to clients sent on Tuesday, said “spending in WA is likely to see a sharp drop in the week ahead followed by a bounce once restrictions are eased”.

The effectiveness of a lockdown has also been questioned by Peter Collignon, an infectious diseases physician and microbiologist at the Australian National University. Professor Collignon said Sydney, Melbourne and New Zealand had been able to stop small outbreaks in recent months without large lockdowns.

“Lockdowns are useful when you’ve got a lot of community transmission and you’re missing a lot of cases,” Professor Collignon said. “That was a reality in Melbourne last winter.

“When you’ve got a limited number of cases, I’m not sure it makes much difference. Both Sydney and Melbourne had outbreaks in December — they had much more cases than Perth — and they were controlled without statewide or citywide lockdowns.

“My presumption is the contact tracing in Perth would be as good as Sydney or Melbourne, so why lock everybody down?”

WA Liberal leader Zak Kirkup has called for the government to move to ban hotel quarantine workers from holding second jobs and for 24-hour testing services to be introduced. The infected guard also worked as a rideshare driver and visited three petrol stations while contagious.