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House of Assembly - Fifty-Fourth Parliament, Second Session (54-2)
2020-11-17 Daily Xml
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Coronavirus, Hotel Quarantine

Mr PICTON (Kaurna) (14:10): My question is to the Premier. How does the Premier definitively know that there was not a breach in hotel quarantine, as he said this morning? With your leave, sir, and that of the house, I will explain.

Leave granted.

Mr PICTON: This morning on SAFM the Premier said, and I quote, 'I just want to emphasise there has been no breach in our hotels.'

The Hon. S.S. MARSHALL (Dunstan—Premier) (14:11): There is just simply no suggestion that there has been a breach, and that was the advice that I had been provided with. I think we have seen in other places around the world that there have been some very significant breaches. We are very proud of the way that we run our quarantine hotels in South Australia.

We subjected ourselves to the independent audit that was done on a national basis by Jane Halton and her team. We came through with flying colours. There were no red flags whatsoever. In fact, we were held up as an exemplar for what best practice looked like in terms of the hotel quarantine arrangements.

The Chief Public Health Officer is extraordinarily busy at the moment, but it's her opinion that the disease has probably been transmitted via a hard surface rather than the traditional way that the disease has been transmitted, which is through close personal contact or aerosol droplets. If this is the case, then I suppose it opens up a whole body of other concerns that we have with regard to this disease.

We have read about this in other jurisdictions, but this is probably the first time we have a really significant concern here in South Australia. Obviously, it will be fully investigated, but we've got a very, very high standard of control and supervision within our hotels that are looking after these people. We are very proud of what we have been able to achieve in South Australia but, as we know, this is a highly contagious disease, and in this instance there has been a situation where one of the workers at the hotel has contracted the disease.

Part of the complexity of this particular case is that the people who contracted the disease, the three people working at Peppers, did not display the normal symptoms, so it was not until one of the family members who was a close contact of one of the workers at Peppers contracted this disease, went off and had themselves tested that we knew about it.

I am very grateful that that was the case. I am very grateful to this person, who went off and got themselves tested, and the family for the very high level of cooperation they have provided to the contact tracing team. Their full cooperation and their detailed knowledge has allowed many hundreds of people to be put into isolation and really do everything we can to trap this disease from spreading even further.

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