Melbourne hotel quarantine failures could have been foreseen, inquiry hears

The infection-control issues at two Melbourne quarantine hotels that ultimately led to Victoria’s second wave of Covid-19 cases could have been foreseen with an “appropriate” focus on health, an inquiry has heard.

Ahead of the final week of hearings for the quarantine hotel inquiry, where it is expected Victorian government ministers, heads of department and the premier, Daniel Andrews, will be grilled about their involvement with the bungled program, counsel assisting the inquiry, Rachel Ellyard laid out some of the potential findings the inquiry could make.

After weeks of evidence from returned travellers, security guards, police, and the public servants responsible for overseeing the quarantining of all returned travellers in Melbourne for 14 days, Ellyard said on Friday that deficiencies with the program could have been foreseen.

Related: Victoria’s former police chief denies pushing use of private guards for hotel quarantine

“It will be open, in our submission, to the board to find that, although the use of hotels as a setting for mass quarantine may have been unprecedented, factors that played a part in the outbreaks from the Rydges Hotel and the Stamford Plaza Hotel, were not unique to hotels as environments,” she said.

“These factors all contributed to an increased risk, which sadly, eventuated. The board may well find that these risks were foreseeable, and may have actually been foreseen, had there been an appropriate level of health focus in the program from the top down to the bottom.”

Outbreaks at the two hotels have been linked to 99% of the thousands of Covid-19 cases in Victoria since late May. Ellyard said before those outbreaks inadequacies had been identified in cleaning, infection control and personal protective equipment used by staff and security contractors.

“These were things that were known to be deficiencies, before the outbreak. For reasons that have not been completely explained, they remained issues, up to and even after the outbreaks,” she said.

The counsel assisting said it was open to the inquiry to find that designating the Rydges hotel as a place where Covid-positive people would stay increased the risk of transmission among guests, as well as the broader community.

“Delays in undertaking a full clean of the Rydges hotel … rendered it an uncontrolled site for longer than should have been the case,” she said. “People who worked at the Rydges hotel during the relevant period were not initially instructed to self-isolate after workers had tested positive.”

Ellyard said there had been a delay of at least seven days from the likely infection event among staff, and four days from the first awareness of the outbreak.

On the management of the program, Ellyard said hotel quarantine was treated as an emergency, and the program was largely focused on control and compliance, not on health.

Those overseeing the program had “no health or medical qualifications and no clinical experience” and the Department of Health and Human Services had “one infection prevention control expert as an employee”.

There was a lack of clarity as to who was responsible for infection control within the hotels on the ground, she said, and the question of who was in charge of the program still remained unanswered.

“[It is] a question that should be able to be easily answered, if emergency management frameworks are working as they’re designed to work,” she said.

The health department was the control agency, she said, with support of the Department of Jobs, Precincts and Regions, but beyond that, who was in control of the program – codenamed Operation Soteria – “remains the subject of inconsistent evidence”.

“No single person ... has accepted that they were in control of Operation Soteria.”

This lack of responsibility was most apparent in the “vexed” question over who was responsible for using security guards at the hotels rather than Victoria police or the Australian defence force. On Thursday, former Victoria police commissioner Graham Ashton rejected suggestions his preference for private security instead of police led to private security being used in the hotels.

Text messages from Ashton on 27 March released to the inquiry on Thursday revealed that at the time hotel quarantine was announced, he believed private security to be part of a deal done by the Department of Premier and Cabinet.

“There’ll be later evidence from the secretary of that department on that question,” Ellyard said on Friday.

Senior Victorian public servants will appear before the inquiry on Monday and Tuesday next week. Andrews, the police minister, Lisa Neville, the industry minister, Martin Pakula, and the health minister, Jenny Mikakos, will be appearing on Wednesday.

Closing submissions will be made the following Monday on 28 September. The report is due to government on 6 November.