It has been nearly 10 months since Australia’s hotel quarantine program for returning travellers commenced.
Over that time, we have witnessed multiple local COVID-19 outbreaks across Melbourne (twice), Brisbane (twice), Adelaide, Perth and Sydney, resulting in capital cities or entire states being locked-down, border closures, and travel chaos. The costs have been enormous with billions of dollars of economic activity lost and, in the case of Melbourne’s major outbreak last year, more than 800 lives lost.
In almost every case, these outbreaks were caused by failures in hotel quarantine, whereby virus leaked into the community via guests to quarantine workers.
One of the main transmission mechanisms was the very structure of hotels: they are densely packed with shared corridors and often shared ventilation. This makes virus transmission more likely. These quarantine hotels are also typically located in capital cities, meaning that when a leakage occurs it spreads quickly into the community, impacting millions of people.
In short, hotels are unsuitable for quarantine purposes and this function should instead be performed in low density accommodation away from capital cities, such as Northern Territory’s Howard Springs Facility:
Northern Territory’s Howard Springs is an ideal model for quarantining returning travellers.
Such facilities provide abundant fresh air and space between guests and staff, making virus transmission less likely. They also provide greater comfort than being stuffed into a hotel room for two weeks. Moreover, in the unlikely event that a virus leakage occurs, there is no need to shut down entire cities.
With this background in mind, it is disturbing to read that the same old hotel quarantine mistakes continue to be made with a family of three contracting COVID from infected neighbours in a Sydney quarantine hotel, presumably via the ventilation system:
[The family of three were] staying next door to a family with the virus at the Adina Apartment hotel.
The three cases within one family had been previously classified as overseas acquired but were reclassified on Sunday after NSW Health determined the cases shared the same viral sequence as the family of four who were in the adjoining room.
The families returned from different countries on different days, and NSW Health said the original family was believed to have been infectious between 8 April and 11 April…
Transmission between people staying in hotel quarantine has been an ongoing struggle for state governments managing the programs.
Quarantine remains Australia’s number one defence against the virus and failures risk catastrophic results, as witnessed with the various hard lockdowns. So why are our governments still conducting quarantine in unsuitable hotels in city locations? Why won’t our governments learn from their mistakes?
Spending a few billion dollars on regional quarantine facilities to prevent 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.
