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Legislative Council - Fifty-Fourth Parliament, Second Session (54-2)
2020-11-17 Daily Xml
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Coronavirus, Hotel Quarantine

The Hon. T.T. NGO (15:19): My question is to the Minister for Health and Wellbeing regarding COVID-19. In view of the The Advertiser revealing that there had been 62 breaches of hotel quarantine procedures identified between April and September, can the minister advise how many times hotel quarantine staff and security guards breached protocol in the past two months and how many times protocols have been breached by other staff or public servants involved in the monitoring and compliance of quarantined travellers?

The Hon. S.G. WADE (Minister for Health and Wellbeing) (15:19): The honourable member raises a detailed question, which I will return with a detailed answer. I think it's important to appreciate that a number of these breaches would be breaches of protocols which may have no relationship to infection control. My understanding is that the data includes a whole range of breaches in terms of the fulfilment of the contracts of the security personnel.

I also want to make the point, and I suppose it relates to the point the Hon. Russell Wortley was making earlier today, that we have an increasingly COVID-positive cohort going into these hotels, and they are being housed in a facility that was not designed as an infection control environment. COVID is a highly infectious disease. It's very difficult to avoid infection. COVID-19 has been acquired by highly trained health professionals working in an acute hospital environment, using full PPE. We have seen that even in our own ICU here in the Royal Adelaide Hospital. I just make the point that infections will occur, whether that's in a hospital environment, health service environment or a medi-hotel. What is important is we need to be ready to stop a case becoming a cluster, and a cluster becoming an outbreak.

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