It is less fortuitous - and no small irony - that he snuck away while being watched by a security guard in a smoking area where security fencing was being installed.
And it must have seemed like a raw deal when officials found out that the solitary positive result from 2131 tests yesterday just happened to be the one person - out of thousands in managed isolation - who had absconded.
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The risk of spread is low but not nil. And as we've seen in locked-down Victoria, it doesn't take much to trigger a surge.
This is now the second escape in a week - a blot in the public's mind on the Government's record, despite Health Minister Chris Hipkins dismissing the claim of any failure of processes.
He has some ground to stand on here. Policing 6000-odd people in 28 facilities across five cities is challenging, and a handful of absconders among 27,000-odd people passing through these facilities since lockdown is hardly an indictment.
That doesn't mean, though, that the system shouldn't be as low-trust as possible.
Smokers have been able to head to an outside area multiple times a day and at all hours. This is a clear risk of mixing and mingling, as well as an apparent temptation to jump a fence (or sneak through a gap).
People in managed isolation in Australia are barely allowed out of their rooms, and the Government here has talked about similar restrictions until Kiwis have had their day-three test and it returns negative.
The Government needs to strike a balance. These people aren't prisoners and The Stamford Plaza is hardly a prison.
But the level of anger at a potential Covid-carrier swanning around our Covid-free community means there would be little public blowback if the Government restricted smoking breaks, tightened out-of-room time, or even stuck an electronic bracelet on everyone.
Hipkins may have the face of a schoolboy but his indignation yesterday was more like that of an enraged headmaster as he sought to discipline the selfish, ungrateful few.
Asked if he would apologise for the man escaping, he was practically fuming in replying that the only one who needed to say sorry was the guy who broke the law.
But if the breach leads to community transmission, it will beg the question: Why can't the Government place guards 24/7 in smoking areas? Given what's at stake, surely it would be worth the cost of the additional resources?
There was no shortage of luck for the National Party yesterday. The timing of the breach suddenly superseded MP Hamish Walker's moment of cerebral flatulence in the headlines.
In a moment reminiscent of the Labour's much-derided Chinese-sounding names fiasco, Walker had sent confidential details of Covid patients to the media because they included some foreign-sounding names.
By his reasoning, this was meant to justify his outburst at the possible arrival in the south of people from India, Pakistan and Korea, but he had failed to acknowledge that they were Kiwis, regardless of where they were flying from.
The supermarket excursion also distracted from the yawning gap between National leader Todd Mullers' limp press release on Tuesday night, when he noted Walker's "error of judgement" and said he'd be making no further comment, and his apparent and very public fury the following morning when he said Walker didn't deserve to be a National candidate.
Walker himself has unsurprisingly gone to ground. He may have even allowed himself a moment of told-you-so when he learned that New Zealand's latest case of Covid-19 did, indeed, fly in from India.
But he'll need a lot more than luck to resurrect his shattered political career.
