Cracks emerged in digital contact tracing system days before five-day lockdown
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Victoriaâs highly touted new digitised contact-tracing system has been hindered by defects since it went live in January, with flaws so serious that tracers stopped calling close contacts during a crucial period just days before the state went into lockdown last month.
A Health Department source told The Sunday Age contact tracing calls to close contacts had to be paused for hours on February 8 after it was discovered tracers had been given the wrong list and were calling people linked to a cluster at a Thai restaurant in Black Rock in January, rather than those potentially exposed to coronavirus cases in active outbreaks.
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Workers and doctors in nine of Victoriaâs quarantine hotels â including the Holiday Inn, from which a coronavirus outbreak leaked into the community â have been moving between multiple hotels and offices, in breach of the recommendations of an inquiry into the schemeâs failings.
The Andrews government has repeatedly emphasised that employees in its hotel quarantine program would not work at other workplaces, and that doctors employed in the scheme would not work at more than one hotel.
The Holiday Inn at Melbourne Airport.
Credit:Jason South
The Coate inquiry into the stateâs hotel quarantine program recommended in December that âevery effort must be made to ensure that all personnel working at the facility are not working across multiple quarantine sitesâ.
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Health experts are demanding Victoriaâs hotel quarantine workers get personal protective equipment on a par with staff in high-risk COVID hospital wards, as a coronavirus cluster linked with the Holiday Inn hotel grew to eight on Wednesday.
South Australia closed the border to residents of Greater Melbourne at midnight on Wednesday in response to the growing outbreak, with that stateâs Chief Health Officer Nicole Spurrier saying she was âvery concernedâ.
And about 10pm on Wednesday, the Department of Health tweeted that they were âtaking a precautionary approachâ and âstrongly encouraging anyone who attended Sunbury Square Shopping Centre on Friday, February 5 between 3.40pm and 4.30pm to urgently seek testing and isolate until they receive a negative resultâ.
Professor Lidia Morawska, director of the International Laboratory for Air Quality and Health at the Queensland University of Technology wants quarantine to be led from Canberra and has called for a review of every hotel providing quarantine in Australia.
âSo, here we are again. The most important aspect is acknowledgement at the top level in Australia that airborne transmission is a main route of transmission in general. This is the golden rule: hazard, not recognised [will] never be controlled and they are stubbornly refusing to recognise this hazard,â Professor Morawska said.
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â[Airborne transmission] has been rejected, rejected and rejected, even though it is so obvious.
Queensland has announced its plan for a series of specialised vaccination hubs to be set up within weeks across the state, providing Australians with some insight as to how the process might work across the country. The state s health chief, Dr Jeanette Young, announced six COVID-19 vaccination sites will be rolled out first in the main cities where incoming travellers are in quarantine: Cairns, Townsville, the Sunshine Coast, Gold Coast and Brisbane s north and south. We will start there with our first six hubs, then as we get those newer vaccines that can be distributed more easily ⦠we ll be able to spread that vaccine throughout the state, she said, while confirming discussions with the government over the sites had taken place.