Security guards working in Victoria's hotel quarantine system were able to skip through a mandatory online COVID-19 training module and guess the correct answers, a court has been told.
The Department of Health, which ran the program between March and July 2020, has been charged by WorkSafe with 58 breaches of the Occupational Health and Safety Act.
A five-week committal hearing is underway for Magistrate Simon Zebrowski to determine if there's sufficient evidence to support a conviction on the charges.
All hotel guards were made to complete a federal government-led online training module on COVID-safe measures like masks and social distancing before starting work, the Melbourne Magistrates Court was told.
But it was easy for the guards to skip through the module's slides and guess correct responses to the final questions, former hotel guard Mario Colistra said on Tuesday.
Mr Colistra told the court he worked at three of the quarantine hotels, including at the Stamford where there was a COVID outbreak in June 2020.
He gave evidence that some guards did not know how to wear or dispose of protective equipment properly because they didn't read through the online module.
"A lot of them are not very clever. They don't have a high standard of education," Mr Colistra told Melbourne Magistrates Court.
"They hoped they could just tick the right boxes in the module so they can go back to work."
Mr Colistra later worked as a security guard in the state's vaccination hubs, where nurses gave one-on-one classes on how to properly don protective equipment.
He told the court that method of teaching was better than what took place in the hotel quarantine system.
One of the allegations against the department is that it failed to provide guards with face-to-face, expert infection prevention control training and written instructions on how to use personal protective equipment.
On Monday, the court was told protective equipment guidelines were given to Wilson Security, MSS Security and Unified Security up to eight weeks after guards were already working in the hotels.
The security firms were also required to source and provide their own protective equipment to staff.
The court was told 90 per cent of cases in Victoria's deadly second wave were traced back to six guards, a healthcare worker and an employee who contracted the virus at the Rydges hotel from May 25, 2020.
Another 10 per cent of cases were traced back to 26 guards and a department employee based at the Stamford from June 16.
The second wave resulted in more than 18,000 new infections, 800 deaths and a lockdown that lasted 112 days.
If found guilty of the WorkSafe charges, the department faces a possible total fine of more than $95 million.
