It is hard to believe that only one month ago the NSW Government hatched a treasonous plan to reserve one-third of the state’s hotel quarantine places for international students to be flown into Australia on chartered flights and have their quarantine costs paid for by universities:
The NSW government is taking a plan to national cabinet to bring up to 1000 international students a week into Sydney starting in the new year…
The students, to arrive on charter flights, will use up nearly one-third of the state’s 3000 passenger a week limit on overseas entries…
The plan is strongly backed by NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian because of the economic benefit it will bring NSW…
The NSW move was welcomed by International Education Association of Australia chief executive Phil Honeywood…
The arriving students will need to spend two weeks in quarantine, and some universities are willing to pay the $3000 quarantine cost on the students’ behalf…
One month on from this brain fart and both NSW and Victoria are battling fresh COVID-19 outbreaks seeded from failed hotel quarantine in NSW.
Yesterday WA Premier Mark McGowan and acting NSW Premier John Barilaro clashed over the issue of hotel quarantine limits, while NSW Chief Health Officer Kerry Chant said that the state was seeing more virus infections in returned travellers:
NSW Chief Health Officer Kerry Chant said Australia may battle the coronavirus for years to come with the disease potentially becoming ingrained, like the flu.
Her comments came amid concerns over the new cluster at a Berala bottle shop in Sydney’s west, which has been linked to staff from NSW’s hotel quarantine program.
“We are are seeing more infections in our returning travellers, and whilst we regret any transmission event, we need to learn from it,” Dr Chant said…
In Queensland, Chief Health Officer Jeannette Young said five new cases in hotel quarantine emphasised “the importance of keeping a very secure hotel quarantine process in place for Queensland”…
Experts said leaks from hotel quarantine systems were inevitable unless the state or federal government imposed tighter controls…
WA Premier Mark McGowan said that since October his state had been doing the heavy lifting on taking in returned travellers, accepting more than NSW on a per capita basis…
Associate Professor Sanjaya Senanayake, an infectious disease expert from the Australian National University, said the only way to guarantee Australia did not face any more outbreaks was to let no one into the country.
“That would be unrealistic and Australians overseas would expect to be repatriated,” Dr Senanayake said.
“It’s not just passengers and tourists who are coming back. It’s also cargo.”
With virus numbers exploding internationally amid new highly infectious strains, the risk of importing the virus via returned travellers is increasing.
Reflecting this, the number of overseas acquired cases in hotel quarantine is rising:
Given the clear risks involved in quarantining international arrivals, quarantine places must be reserved for returning Australian citizens and permanent residents only. To do otherwise would not only be unfair to the tens-of-thousands of Australians still stranded abroad, but would also greatly increase the risks of importing the virus.
The education industry’s shameless lobbying for international students to return needs to be rejected outright.
