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It is hard to deny that the Victorian Government has failed in managing its hotel quarantine program.
Victoria’s deadly second wave in mid-2020 was seeded when untrained private security guards leaked virus into the community, resulting in Melbourne being locked down for 16 consecutive weeks and around 800 deaths.
Victoria has only today emerged from another 5-day hard lockdown after virus escaped from the Holiday Inn quarantine hotel earlier this month.
Over the weekend it was revealed that Victoria’s hotel quarantine program was left out of the state’s key taskforce on infection control for frontline workers, leaving Australian Medical Association (AMA) president Julian Rait
Quarantine must be made to work better
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Since the most recent return to lockdown, the message from Victoria’s government to its population has been that “we know how to do this”. However with the latest breach of hotel quarantine, a reasonable response is “are you sure?”. Moreover, those voices asking why we have to keep doing it – and more importantly, whether the government is learning from its mistakes – have grown increasingly urgent and authoritative.
Age, Professor Lindsay Grayson – an expert witness at last year’s state inquiry into hotel quarantine and leading infectious diseases expert – says that infection controls within the state’s quarantine hotel system still aren’t strict enough when it comes to protective equipment and procedures. He also argues that talk of the challenge posed by the so-called UK variant of the virus is mis