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Lawyers suing security companies that worked in Victoria’s bungled hotel quarantine program need to work out which hotel the COVID-19 strain that killed their client’s father came from before the class action can proceed.
Law firm Arnold Thomas & Becker is pursuing Unified Security Group and MSS Security on behalf of lead plaintiff Dragan Markovic, whose father contracted COVID-19 in a nursing home and died at the end of August in hospital.
The last photo of Dragan Markovic with his father Nenad Markovic before the elderly man s death from COVID-19.
He was among the 800 people who died in Victoria’s second wave, with 99.8 per cent of cases traced to outbreaks in the quarantine program at two of the hotels: the Rydges on Swanston and the Stamford Plaza.
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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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As the UK government prepares to bring in the most onerous travel restrictions ever known, there are mounting concerns about whether hotel quarantine will work smoothly.
Forensic analysis of the Australian system, introduced in March 2020, reveals many concerns – from bio-security breaches due to “fresh-air breaks” to the mental wellbeing of quarantining travellers.
From Monday 15 February, all passengers arriving in the UK from “red list” countries are required to pay for 11 nights in an airport hotel. The price for the stay and three meals a day is £1,750 for individual travellers.
The measure was first promoted by ministers four weeks ago, and officially announced by the prime minister on 27 January.
Australia: Victorian Hotel Quarantine Inquiry finds “failure of governance”
The Board of Inquiry into Victoria’s disastrous Hotel Quarantine Program delivered its final report on December 21. Genomic testing has revealed that the state’s second wave of COVID-19, which resulted in 801 deaths and more than 18,000 infections, almost certainly originated in two of the hotels used to quarantine returned travellers.
Predictably, the report is a whitewash. Justice Jennifer Coate’s recommendations call for little more than further investigation “as to the lines of accountability and responsibility between Departmental heads and Ministers.”
Justice Jennifer Coate during the hotel quarantine inquiry (Screenshot from public hearings)
CLUSTER MOVE
NSW Health’s list of COVID-19 case locations has grown to more than 100 venues, with
The Sydney Morning Herald reporting that, although all locally-acquired cases are linked to the Northern Beaches cluster, several of yesterday’s 15 new cases were infected outside the region i.e. Turramurra Salon for Hair on the north shore and The Rose in Erskineville.
With
Gladys Berejiklian due to make a decision tomorrow on current restriction levels, the ABC reports the state government is cautiously optimistic and UNSW epidemiologist
Mary-Louise McLaws is confident the city will, at least, not experience a Melbourne-style outbreak. Conversely,