“Robodebt of medicine” seems like one of the worst metaphors ever conceived.

This is the best summary I could come up with:

Twelve months later Australian hospitals have become a strange new battleground in the fight against COVID, with doctors and public health experts concerned that too many patients are catching the virus — and an alarming number are dying — as a result of inadequate infection control.

“The institutional turning-a-blind-eye toward a disease that we know is wreaking havoc within our hospitals — and the permissive nature in which we’re allowing patients to catch it — will be regarded as a ‘Robodebt’ style failure of public health policy, in my opinion.”

The president of the Australian Medical Association Queensland, Maria Boulton, recently took the extraordinary step of writing to Chief Health Officer John Gerrard to raise concerns that patients were catching COVID in hospitals and in some cases dying as a result.

In an ideal world, they say, good ventilation and air filtration should be prioritised, with other interventions layered on top: routine testing, isolating COVID positive patients in single-bed rooms, using fit-tested N95 respirators.

Just last month hundreds of British doctors with long COVID announced they’re planning to sue the National Health Service for negligent workplace exposure to the virus, claiming the NHS did not require staff to wear adequate PPE when treating infected patients in 2020.

In Australia, similar lawsuits are already being brought — nurses against aged care homes, passengers against cruise liner companies — though it may be some time before momentum builds in the healthcare sector because the law “is a blunt and slow tool”, Dr Miller says.

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