THREE days after an unknown number of Sunraysia residents were sent for needless COVID-19 testing and isolation by an apparent clerical error, mystery surrounding the cause of the mistake has been deepened by silence.
While it is understood the listing of Harvey Norman Mildura as a tier 1 exposure site was a mistake made in either Bendigo Health or the Victoria’s Health Department, a spokesman for the former said it would be making no further comment, while the department’s media team did not return calls from Sunraysia Daily.
On Friday, Bendigo Health said the advice that store staff and customers should get tested and monitor for symptoms had been incorrectly published and later removed from the Health Department’s website.
Asked on Sunday to provide details of how the mistake happened – and an assurance for the public that it would not happen again – a spokesman for Bendigo Health said that it would not expand on Friday’s statement.
He said he did not know where the mistake had been made and that Sunraysia Daily would not be permitted to talk to senior staff about it.
It is not clear how many people were needlessly tested or isolated as a result of the error, but long queues at a city testing site on Friday suggested that numbers were in the dozens at least.
Some of those affected have taken to social media over the weekend to express their frustration.
“Not good enough,” wrote Greg Marr on the Sunraysia Daily Facebook page.
“Had to take the whole day off with out pay. Had a tractor on the truck to deliver and a header to get detailed for the owner. So had to get someone else to do my work, then their jobs never got done,” he wrote.
“Too bad for the ones who have had to have time off work because of this,” wrote Mary Crump, while Shawn Kendrigan pointed out that health authorities “only had two years to get it right”.
The mistake follows another error in July, when the Mildura Central shopping centre was incorrectly listed as an exposure site.
At the time, the State Government said that a review of a patient’s infectious period was the source of that error, but it did not say how many people had been sent for unnecessary tests, which had caused long waiting times at testing sites.
The Mildura local government area reported 10 new COVID cases on Sunday, after another 30 surfaced on Saturday.
As of Sunday, there were 22,013 active cases in Victoria, 702 of these in hospital and 128 in intensive care. Eighty patients were on ventilators.
There were 1036 new cases reported in Victoria and 12 deaths.
In NSW, one new case in Broken Hill was the only one reported in the Far West Local Health District on Sunday. There were 18 active cases in the area, 13 of these in the Wentworth LGA.
