‘Multiple quarantine failures’
Pharmaceutical scientist Sir Ray Avery is calling for an urgent independent commission of inquiry into the management of New Zealand’s Covid quarantine facilities, following the exposure of “gaps” in the Jet Park Hotel high security quarantine facility in Auckland, where a Covid-infected nurse working at the hotel was allowed to attended multiple group fitness classes, supermarkets and a large store.
Avery, an expert in the control of infectious diseases in closed room environments, said there was evidence of multiple failures in New Zealand’s quarantine facilities.
“This purely negates the efforts and sacrifices that all New Zealanders have made to prevent community transmission of Covid-19,” he said, adding that the principle of eradicating diseases such as leprosy was to build quarantine facilities where no one was allowed to leave unless they were disease-free.
At the Jet Park airport hotel, nursing and other service staff who had been exposed to the most concentrated group of Covid-infected patients were allowed to go out into the community at the end of the day.
“This is not a quarantine facility but a community Covid inoculation facility,” he said.
“What makes this revelation more damaging is that the majority of our frontline medical staff are not being provided with the correct PPE N95 approved respirator masks to prevent them from contracting Covid from the infected quarantined people they are monitoring and testing.
“It is a legal Worksafe requirement for frontline medical staff dealing with infectious diseases that they be issued with fitting N95 respirator masks to prevent them from contracting life-threatening infections.”
Information obtained under the Official Information Act, he said, showed that the Ministry of Health had been undertaking work to understand fit-testing procedures across all DHBs.
“Exceptionally low” numbers of the workforce had been fit-tested, “so pretty much none of our frontline healthcare workers are wearing the correct fit-tested PPE respirator masks, which would prevent them from contracting Covid”.
“This is a perfect storm with respect to an instrument for promoting community transmission of Covid-19,” he said.
“Effectively, we are containing all the highly contagious Covid people in a hotel, getting a nurse to routinely come into contact with her infected patients while not wearing the correctly fit-tested PPE, and then sending her out into the community.
“For the health and wellbeing of all New Zealanders we need an independent commission of inquiry into our border quarantine controls. All the sacrifices that have been made by so many Kiwis will be for nothing. We need to get this right.”