For months MB has called for quarantining of international arrivals to be shifted out of dense city hotels to low density accommodation in regional areas.
The logic is obvious: packing overseas arrivals into hotel rooms with shared ventilation and corridors greatly increases the risk of spreading the virus among workers, guests and the wider community. These risks are made worse by quarantine workers mingling among the community after their shifts or working second jobs.
Put simply, using hotels for quarantine opens up too many possible vectors of transmission into the community, risking more outbreaks and lockdowns.
With this background in mind, it is little wonder that NSW officials are scrambling to determine how a Sydney quarantine security guard became infected with COVID while working on the 11th floor of the Sofitel in Wentworth.
The security guard tested positive for the UK strain on 13 March, and Chief Health Officer Kerry Chant says that genomic sequencing has revealed a match between the guard’s sample and that of an infected returned traveller.
However, it is uncertain as to how the virus was transmitted to the security guard, as the infected traveller had not opened his hotel room door when the guard was on duty. Nor did CTV footage reveal that the security guard breached protocol.
To make matters worse, the security guard had been working weekends at several quarantine hotels, including the Sofitel Wentworth and Mantra hotel Haymarket, thus risking cross-infection.
Occam’s razor suggests that the quarantine guard contracted the virus through the shared ventilation system; although this has not been confirmed.
Nevertheless, the case does highlight, yet again, why quarantine should not be conducted in city hotels.
Instead, the federal government should establish new facilities in regional Australia modelled on Northern Territory’s Howard Spings facility (which the federal government funded):
Facilities like Howard Springs offer obvious benefits compared with quarantine hotels, namely:
- They are located away from major population centres;
- They provide abundant fresh air and space between guests and staff; and
- They provide greater comfort than being stuffed into a hotel room for two weeks.
Quarantine remains Australia’s number one defence against the virus and failures risk catastrophic results, as we witnessed in Victoria (twice), South Australia, Queensland and Western Australia.
Spending a few billion dollars on regional quarantine facilities, and preventing further outbreaks and shutdowns, would be money well spent. It would also help the tourism industry far more than subsidising plane tickets at the cost of billions.
