Lisa Wilkinson Highlights 'Problem' With Australian Open Allowing COVID-Affected Tennis Players In
TV presenter Lisa Wilkinson said there is a “problem” with international tennis players flying into Melbourne for the Australian Open tournament after testing positive for the coronavirus.
During a segment on the news and current affairs show ‘The Project’ on Thursday night, Wilkinson and her co-hosts discussed US player Tennys Sandgren being granted special permission to board a chartered flight from Los Angeles despite testing positive Monday for COVID-19 after he’d previously tested positive in November.
Tennis Australia said the decision to allow Sandgren to fly had been made after a review by medical officials, but Wilkinson said the exemption won’t go down too well with Australians stranded overseas.
“Now, I think a lot of people are going to be pretty outraged about this, given the number of Australians who are overseas at the moment desperate to get back home,” Wilkinson said on TV.
A spokesperson for COVID-19 Quarantine Victoria told The Guardian that it had cleared Sandgren for the flight after concluding he was still shedding fragments of the virus after the November infection, which can cause a positive test result.
Australia has halved the number of returning nationals allowed in as authorities come to terms with the implications of highly contagious British and South African variants of the virus that have been detected in Australia. Once they finally get home to Australia, arrivals must spend 14 days in hotel quarantine at their own expense. The country’s borders to all non-citizens and permanent residents remain closed.
Wilkinson acknowledged that health authorities would’ve thought it through before letting Sandgren fly in and that “everyone who gets off that plane is going to go into quarantine anyway... all of the tennis players are going to be tested every single day”.
“The only thing I would say is I think this is a bit of a PR problem for the tennis,” she then told her co-hosts. “I think one thing...
