Health authorities defend handling of coronavirus cluster at Melbourne psychiatric facility
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Version 0 of 1. Fifteen people, including six patients, from the Albert Road Clinic have tested positive to Covid-19 since 24 March Victorian health authorities have defended their response to a coronavirus outbreak in an inpatient psychiatric facility after staff and patients were not told of the cluster until one month after the first positive test. Meanwhile more than 180 Australians and New Zealanders will arrive in Melbourne on Sunday on the last government-supported repatriation flight from Argentina, and the billionaire media mogul Kerry Stokes has left Western Australia to attend the Australian War Memorial in Canberra just four days after his quarantine lifted. Fifteen people, including six patients, from the Albert Road Clinic have tested positive to Covid-19 since 24 March, but the cluster was only reported publicly on Friday. Victoria’s deputy chief health officer, Annaliese van Diemen, defended the health department’s response to the outbreak. “The fact that the Victorian public found out yesterday doesn’t mean nothing’s been happening since the 24th of March, it’s not the same thing,” van Diemen said. “But we are obviously reviewing all of the actions that have been undertaken and if there’s anything that needs to change either at Albert Road Clinic or at the department then that will be undertaken.” Van Diemen said all staff at the clinic and patients who had been discharged over the past two days had been told to quarantine at home for 14 days, and would receive daily calls from the health department. She dismissed criticism that risk assessments should already have been conducted on people who have been at the clinic over the past month. “We are making risk assessments across all of the staff and the patients in the facility and all of them will be contacted at a time that is appropriate once we have the information to undertake that risk assessment,” she said. The number of people who have died in Australia after testing positive to Covid-19 has climbed to 80, after the death of a 90-year-old man at Mersey Community hospital in Devonport, Tasmania. New South Wales saw its highest number of new cases in several days, with 12 new cases including four at the Newmarch House aged care home, where five people have died. Announcing the increase, the health minister, Brad Hazzard, said he was disappointed to see that crowds had flocked to the Sydney beaches when they were briefly reopened on Friday. “I have to express a degree of disappointment and agitation about the fact that some people, when the rules are relaxed, when we try and do the right thing by giving people the opportunity to have some outside exercise, [they] are disregarding the very strong message of social distancing,” Hazzard said. Victoria recorded three new positive cases, including one inpatient at the Albert Road Clinic, and Tasmania recorded two new cases, both in the north-west. Western Australia and the ACT both recorded one new case each. The Qantas flight from Buenos Aires will leave on Saturday afternoon, local time, and arrive in Melbourne at 7.30pm on Sunday. Two other government-supported commercial flights will leave Australia the same day bound for Thailand and Pakistan, carrying residents of those countries home. Brett Hackett, the Australian ambassador to Argentina, Uruguay and Paraguay, said the embassy in Buenos Aries had to cancel its Anzac Day celebrations because of Argentina’s lockdown, “but I reckon helping Australians and New Zealanders return home on the 25th of April is just as good if not better”. Many Australians and New Zealanders commemorated Anzac Day by lighting a candle at their driveway as memorials remained closed due to social distancing rules. A small group, including the prime minister, Scott Morrison, attended a dawn service at the Australian War Memorial in Canberra. Among those present was Stokes, who is the chairman of the Australian War Memorial Council, and his wife, Christine. The couple returned from the US on their private jet earlier this month and received an exemption on medical grounds to the requirement to undergo a mandatory hotel quarantine, instead seeing out the 14-day quarantine in their Perth mansion. That quarantine ended on Wednesday. Asked if they planned to seek another exemption from mandatory hotel quarantine if they returned to WA while the hard domestic border remained in place, a spokesman for Stokes said the couple planned to go to their home in Sydney. There are no domestic travel restrictions on entering NSW or the ACT from other states. |