Melbourne, Australia – Australia is struggling to control an outbreak of the highly contagious Delta variant of the coronavirus that began with an unmasked and unvaccinated driver of an international aircrew in Sydney.
A lockdown in the city, Australia’s biggest, has been extended until the end of August. Other main cities, including Melbourne, are now easing restrictions, but states have imposed curbs on interstate travel.
The outbreak has put pressure on a government whose vaccination programme is one of the slowest among developed nations and once again raised questions about the hotel quarantine system for international travellers imposed at the start of the pandemic.
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As the UK government prepares to bring in the most onerous travel restrictions ever known, there are mounting concerns about whether hotel quarantine will work smoothly.
Forensic analysis of the Australian system, introduced in March 2020, reveals many concerns – from bio-security breaches due to “fresh-air breaks” to the mental wellbeing of quarantining travellers.
From Monday 15 February, all passengers arriving in the UK from “red list” countries are required to pay for 11 nights in an airport hotel. The price for the stay and three meals a day is £1,750 for individual travellers.
The measure was first promoted by ministers four weeks ago, and officially announced by the prime minister on 27 January.
Leala Grindstaff posted a video to her TikTok account on Dec. 30 explaining that she had just tested positive for COVID-19 and that she would be spending the next two weeks quarantining at a hotel through the city’s Hotel Isolation Program. In a video published about a week later, she explained that she chose to participate in the program because she lives in a four-bedroom, one-bathroom apartment and didn’t feel like she could properly isolate herself from the people she lives with.
Grindstaff is staying at the LaGuardia Plaza Hotel. In her videos, she details the food she’s provided and how she spends her time.
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Fun fact: if we were in New York, Los Angeles or London, it d be easier for us to get home to Melbourne. Expensive, difficult, yes. But legal.
But instead we re in far off, remote and COVID-plagued Sydney. And right now there is, as far as we can tell, no feasible, legal route home for our family for the foreseeable future.
Nick Miller and members of his family. They have been stuck in Sydney red zone by COVID-related border issues.
Credit:Nick Miller
To rewind. A few days before Christmas, NSW recorded a worrying burst of 30 COVID-19 cases in a day. Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews stepped up to the microphone and laid out a difficult choice.
Australia: Victorian Hotel Quarantine Inquiry finds “failure of governance”
The Board of Inquiry into Victoria’s disastrous Hotel Quarantine Program delivered its final report on December 21. Genomic testing has revealed that the state’s second wave of COVID-19, which resulted in 801 deaths and more than 18,000 infections, almost certainly originated in two of the hotels used to quarantine returned travellers.
Predictably, the report is a whitewash. Justice Jennifer Coate’s recommendations call for little more than further investigation “as to the lines of accountability and responsibility between Departmental heads and Ministers.”
Justice Jennifer Coate during the hotel quarantine inquiry (Screenshot from public hearings)