The government has consistently made wrong decisions on vaccines and quarantine. If there are no aged care casualties, it will be sheer dumb luck.
If for some perverse and malignant policy reason the Morrison government wanted COVID-19 to once again affect unvaccinated residents in aged care, what steps would it have taken?
In particular, what learnings could it have applied from the experience last year in Victoria when hundreds of seniors died as a result of an outbreak due to poor hotel quarantine standards?
The first step would have been to ensure that further outbreaks were certain. The best way to ensure that would have been to continue to rely on the hotel quarantine system, which a report commissioned by the government advised would continue to be prone to breaches. That’s what the federal government did, with the complicity of the states. No new quarantine facilities were funded or built to provide higher-quality quarantine that was not prone to leading to infections of people within.
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