Victoria's hotel quarantine WuhanCovid breaches: Where is the evidence that returnees held in quarantine at the Stamford and Regis hotels are the source of the "second wave" contagion?
by Ganesh Sahathevan
Four of Victoria's new coronavirus cases are linked to an outbreak at the Stamford Plaza in Melbourne.(ABC News)
The reporting on Victoria's WuhanCovid "second wave" has assumed that the outbreak has been the result of breaches in quarantine protocol at the Stamford and Rydges hotels in Melbourne.
Examples of the reporting are as follows. From the ABC on 13 June 2020:
A hotspot map for Victoria, for the relevant period ie January and February 2020, has not been located but readers are referred to the story below from the Herald Sun dated 25 January 2020. Readers can decide for themselves if Dan Andrews of Victoria has been negligent in not testing and locking down travellers from China who entered Victoria in and around that time.
Berejiklian and Andrews seem more concerned with not offending their ethnic Chinese vote; they have been fortunate to have had medical officers who seemed only to happy to provide politically correct advice.
The reporting on Victoria's WuhanCovid "second wave" has assumed that the outbreak has been the result of breaches in quarantine protocol at the Stamford and Rydges hotels in Melbourne.
Examples of the reporting are as follows. From the ABC on 13 June 2020:
Six of the new cases were detected in mandatory hotel quarantine, while the other one person is a household contact linked to an outbreak at the Rydges on Swanston hotel cluster.
The Rydges hotel in Melbourne's CBD has been used to quarantine returned travellers and is now linked to 17 infections, including a number of contractor security guards working at the hotel.
The Age newspaper on Saturday reported allegations of lax hygiene standards during the quarantine period.
The state recorded 13 new cases of coronavirus overnight, including five people who were contracted to work in the government's mandatory quarantine program at the Stamford Plaza hotel in Melbourne's CBD.
Based on the assumption it appears that it is being also assumed that the "second wave" has been brought into Victoria by those held in quarantine, but as the above reporting shows, there has been no reporting with regards that cohort. The reporting has concerned the behaviour of the guards who, it can be safely assumed, were already in the community in Victoria long before they presented themselves for work at the hotels concerned. This writer is happy to be corrected, but it does appear that the Victorian Government and its premier, Daniel Andrews, are using the quarantine breaches as a smokescreen.
TO BE READ WITH
Sunday, August 2, 2020
WuhanCovid data presented by ESRI suggests Gladys Berejiklian, Dan Andrews are neglecting if not ignoring primary hotspot data in order to preserve the ethnic Chinese vote :The costs in the form of loss of income are being borne by all of us
by Ganesh Sahathevan
ESRI is a company that specialises in GIS software. It has presented Australian WuhanCovid data on its website https://covid19-
The first image presented is this.
In lay terms the graph shows that the number of reported cases, which have risen (or are positively correlated) with the the number of tests, rose sharply, slowed and then plateaued during the lockdown of March-June. Cases have started spiking again after the lockdown was been lifted.
The graph does suggest that the WuhanCovid virus was always lurking in the background and that the lockdown did not(in fact could not have possibly) "neutralised" the virus.
The premiers of NSW and Victoria have placed blame on a number of individual incidents that occurred after lockdon, claiming these were "seeding" events that have caused the spike.
Berejiklian of NSW and Andrews of Victoria have both however avoided, perhaps evaded, any reference to the fact that they both allowed into their states travellers from Wuhan and other parts of China throughout January and February despite extensive reporting here and overseas about the outbreak of the virus in Wuhan.
Simple probability would suggest that if a small number of individual cases can be regarded significant seeding events, then plane loads of travellers from China must have posed a far greater risk.
It is a fact that the initial WuhanCovid hotspots in NSW are areas with large ethnic Chinese populations.
As reported by this writer Premier Berejiklian refused to isolate residents in the hotspots for mandatory testing and lockdown:
As stated then and which this writer will repeat:
It is not racist to target suburbs with a high concentration of Chinese residents living in high rise apartments, in an area that has been identified with the Wuhan Virus
Berejiklian and Andrews seem more concerned with not offending their ethnic Chinese vote; they have been fortunate to have had medical officers who seemed only to happy to provide politically correct advice.
The solution then is to focus testing on persons who live in the hotspots, and then from there to attempt a mapping of the spread of the Wuhan Covid virus using well known GIS techniques such as kriging. What is needed are targeted initiatives, not economy wide lockdowns which require hundreds of billions in debt, which will cost us all, notwithstanding the advice of Emma Alberici of the ABC.
END
Reference
News
How deadly Chinese virus came to Australia
Tom Minear and Rebekah Cavanagh
1681 words
25 January 2020
NLHRSW
English
© 2020 News Limited. All rights reserved.
The man who brought coronavirus to Melbourne may have exposed many others to the deadly illness.
The Chinese national, aged in his 50s, lives in Wuhan, where the new strain originated.
He booked a flight to Melbourne to see family long before he knew he was ill.
Symptom-free, he boarded a plane from the infected city to Guangzhou, a two-hour journey.
The man arrived in Melbourne at 9am on Sunday, January 19, on China Southern Airlines flight CZ321 from Guangzhou. This flight included codeshare passengers for Qantas flight QF330, among four others.
— Were you on China Southern Airlines flight CZ321 from Guangzhou to Melbourne, landing on January 19? Email rebekah.cavanagh@news.
Still, the man felt fine, so no precautions were taken during the 9½ hour flight, seated with hundreds of other passengers sharing the same cabin air.
The man got off the plane at Melbourne Airport and went to stay with family — three adults and a child. He was tired, so slept when he got home, and his symptoms began to show the next day.
State Health Minister Jenny Mikakos said his family contacted their GP on Thursday with concerns for his health. The man went double-masked to the clinic to be assessed.
But the GP did not suspect he had coronavirus, despite being a resident of Wuhan.
The man returned to the family home but his symptoms did not improve.
Concerned, his relatives contacted Monash Medical Centre, and he was taken masked through the emergency department to an isolation room.
He remains in isolation, with pneumonia, and is in a stable condition.
The man’s family was staying inside but had not been put into formal isolation with authorities checking in with them daily to ensure they were not showing symptoms.
Chief Health Officer Dr Angie Bone said quarantining the family and everyone on the flight at the centre of the outbreak was “not a sensible approach”.
The man had not been in any public areas since his arrival, and only had contact with his family.
She could not say which suburb he was staying in.
His family is being closely monitored for signs of any symptoms.
PASSENGERS FEAR DEADLY VIRUS
Health Minister Jenny Mikakos said all passengers on the affected man’s China Southern Airlines flight CZ321 to Melbourne would be notified.
But passengers aboard the flight told the Sunday Herald Sun of their concern and how they have had no contact from the airline or health authorities about the outbreak.
Some had decided on their own accord to remain locked down in their homes in case they had contracted the virus.
More Victorian patients were on Saturday night being tested for the virus.
Authorities said “a handful” of concerned patients had presented with flu-like symptoms.
The fresh wave of patients tested was expecting to get results on Sunday.
Caulfield North woman Xinwen Xu, 45, was on the same flight as the infected man.
Her daughter Lyn Shen, 21, said she was “feeling very nervous” after hearing about the coronavirus diagnosis on the news.
The family had not been contacted by authorities, but decided to place themselves in isolation as a precautionary measure, Ms Shen said.
“My mother is feeling well, not sick at all, but still will isolate herself in the house, to be safe,” Ms Shen said. “But she is feeling very nervous.”
Jane Shao, 51, from Ashwood also travelled on the plane, but did not visit Wuhan.
She told the Sunday Herald Sun she had felt unwell for a number of days with a sore throat and swollen eyes, and visited her doctor on Friday.
On learning of the confirmed coronavirus case, she said she was “very shocked” and contacted health authorities again.
“Normally I don’t get sick for this long. It doesn’t usually last this long,” Ms Shao said.
She will heed advice from health authorities and return to her GP if her condition worsened.
Another passenger Juan Yang, 35, said the news she may have been exposed to the virus was frightening.
“I feel shocked when I read the news, I will try to stay home for the next week,” Ms Yang said, adding she had not experienced any symptoms.
Officials have been stationed at Melbourne Airport to inform passengers arriving from China about safety precautions.
VICTIM COULD HAVE CAUGHT VIRUS ‘SECOND-HAND’
Dr Bone said it was concerning the GP had not made any link with the man’s illness and the fact he had come from Wuhan.
She said the department had issued an alert to hospitals and GPs on the virus and provided advice about symptoms.
“We ask GPs to ask people presenting with respiratory illness their travel history,” she said.
The victim never went to the market where the virus is expected to have originated and is also not a healthcare worker in China treating suspected patients, Dr Bone said.
“He’s potentially a second-hand case,” she said.
At this stage there is little known about the incubation periods of the virus, she said, so it is unclear when he would have contracted the virus.
Ms Mikakos urged Melburnians not to panic, saying the risk to the public is “low”.
“There is no reason for alarm in the general community,” she said.
“We are doing everything possible to keep the community safe.”
The recent outbreak of coronavirus China has quickly spread to other parts of the world.
Seven other Australians are under investigation for the virus including five in NSW.
The death toll continues to rise in China, with 41 confirmed deaths and more than 850 people infected.
Construction on a special 1000-bed hospital is underway in Wuhan as the city struggles to cope with the number of infected patients in the city.
Authorities in China have put 14 cities in lockdown, closed parts of the Great Wall of China and Disneyland in Shanghai.
Federal Health Minister Greg Hunt said: “Australia has world-class health systems with processes for the identification and treatment of cases, including isolation facilities in each state and territory, these processes have been activated.”
“Our laboratories have developed testing processes for this novel coronavirus that can provide a level of certainty within a day,’’ he said.
Minister Hunt said Victorian and Commonwealth authorities would be undertaking “contact tracing” for passengers who travelled on this flight and to provide them with information and advice.
Federal, state and territory health ministers held a joint teleconference to discuss how the nation will respond to coronavirus.
Mr Hunt said “we will be meeting all flights from China” and increasing information about the virus at airports.
Doctors will also receive new alerts about coronavirus, and its symptoms, through the Australia Medical Association and The Royal Australian College of General Practitioners, he said.
“We are working with the AMA and the RACGP to ensure that all doctors are fully informed of and alert to symptoms of coronavirus,” Mr Hunt wrote on Twitter.
The Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade issued a “level 4: do not travel” alert for Wuhan and Hubei Province in China overnight.
The alert has been published on the Smart Traveller website.
The advice level for China as a whole has not changed.
Australian Chief Medical Officer Professor Brendan Murphy said Victoria had acted swiftly and appropriately.
“Victoria has followed its strict protocols, including isolating the affected person. I understand the patient has pneumonia and is in a stable condition,’’ Prof Murphy said.
“We don’t know exactly how long symptoms take to show after a person has been infected, but there is an incubation period and some patients will have very mild symptoms.
“Symptoms include fever, cough, sore throat, vomiting and difficulty breathing. Difficulty breathing is a sign of possible pneumonia and requires immediate medical attention.
“People who arrive in Australia from an international flight with these symptoms should alert their airline, or a biosecurity officer if they have disembarked.”
AIRPORT TRAVELLERS MASKED AGAINST MENACE
Little Tina Wang walked through Melbourne Airport with her father, Tony, wearing a princess dress and a face mask.
“I don’t want to risk her catching the disease,” Mr Wang said of the five-year-old from Shanghai. “I want to keep her safe.”
Just one of scores of Chinese nationals arriving at Melbourne Airport on Saturday wearing face masks for protection from coronavirus, Mr Wang said he was taking no chances with his little girl’s health.
Melbourne University student Helen Li, who arrived on a later plane from Chengdu, Sichuan, said almost every passenger on her flight wore face masks, out of fear of contracting the killer virus. “They really only took the masks off to eat, otherwise they kept them on all the time,” Ms Li, 21, said.
The Chinese-born music student had been holidaying at home with her family in Sichuan, when news broke of coronavirus claiming lives.
“Mum was so worried about the virus she sent me back to Australia,” Ms Li said.
It was not until the plane touched down that she learned, via a message from a friend, there had been a confirmed cause of coronavirus in Melbourne, with a man in his 50s from Wuhan falling ill and hospitalised.
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“It is very serious to hear that, it is not good,” she said.
Siqui Xu, 18, who arrived on the same flight from Chengdu with her 17-year-old friend Sunny Wu, an international student, and two of Ms Wu’s family, Wei Wu and Minruo Wei, said many people back in China were scared of the virus spreading and of the prospect of more deaths.
“It is not so much the old people who are worried, it is mostly the young people who are frightened because they know more about viruses like this,” she said.
“The young people know how dangerous it can be.”
News Ltd.
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Posted by Ganesh Sahathevan at 9:30 PM
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