A man has managed to escape his fourth-floor hotel quarantine room in Perth by tying bed sheets together, end-to-end, as if he were busting out of Alcatraz and not allegedly breaching a public health order during a global pandemic.
WA Police allege that at around 12:45am on Monday morning, the 39-year-old bloke “climbed out a window of the fourth floor room using a rope made of bed sheets and fled the area.”
He was eventually tracked down at around 8:55am on Beaufort Street in the Perth suburb of Mt. Lawley, where he was arrested.
Ultimately, the bloke was charged with failure to comply with a direction and providing false or misleading information. The good news is that he tested negative for COVID-19.
It turned out that the man wasn’t even an international arrival, either.
Instead, he had arrived interstate from Brisbane but without a G2G pass, which is Western Australia’s system for clearing interstate arrivals. The state currently has a hard border with NSW, Queensland and Victoria, as well as restricted travel to and from South Australia and the ACT.
The man was made to fill out a G2G pass on the spot in Perth, which was promptly denied because he didn’t meet the travel ban exemption criteria.
He was made to leave the state in 48 hours, and in the meantime was put into temporary hotel quarantine. So unlike some of the more deranged international arrivals, this guy wasn’t even trying to get out of a 14-day hotel quarantine stay.
The ABC reports that the man faced court via audio-link on Tuesday afternoon. He didn’t apply for bail and was remanded in custody until his 14-day quarantine period ends in early August, when he’ll be able to face court in person.
Let this debacle be a lesson for hotel quarantine room attendants: supply fewer bed sheets.
