A night manager at one of Melbourne's busiest quarantine hotels may have inadvertently sparked Victoria's second wave of the highly infectious coronavirus and not a security guard, according to reports.
Dubbed 'patient zero', the hotel employee is reported to have caught the virus while working at Rydges on Swanston Street before inadvertently spreading it to his colleagues who then passed it on to their families, reports The Age.
Leaked emails obtained by the The Age show the night manager came down with a fever on Monday, May 25, and the next day officials from the Department of Jobs, Precincts and Regions were told the man had tested positive COVID-19.
There is no suggestion the night manager caught the virus through any improper behaviour. It is unclear how he became infected.
The following day, emails revealed the night manager was "now isolating at Rydges".
Seven security guards from contractor Unified Security were ordered to get tested for COVID-19 and self-isolate at home.
A number of hotel staff and health care workers did the same.
But five of the seven guards had already caught the virus and unknowingly spread it between their families in Melbourne's northern and western suburbs.
Genomic sequencing suggest a large proportion, if not all, of the state's second wave cases could be traced back to the breaches in hotel quarantine, according to Victoria's Chief Health Officer Brett Sutton.
To date, 275 people have died of COVID-19 in Victoria.
The Age reports the email chain revealed that officials initially mistakenly reported that a security guard was the first positive test.
But that was later corrected by a senior official who confirmed that it was a hotel employee.
According to records, the man was not showing any symptoms of the virus when he began his shift on May 25.
The hotel has been contacted for comment.
Yesterday Victoria's Health Minister Jenny Mikakos was stripped of hotel quarantine responsibilities as more members of parliament wiped their hands of the bungled project.
The scheme has now been handed to Attorney-General Jill Hennessy.
Melbourne's hotel quarantine system is now the subject of an independent inquiry, with public hearings to start next week.
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