Hotel quarantine failures prompt calls for alternatives like Howard Springs in the NT
Expert reviews and independent scientists are calling for alternatives to hotel quarantine. The NT does it best in a 3000-bed former mining camp.
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Hotel quarantine has failed and alternatives must be found if we are to protect SA citizens from COVID-19, experts say.
UniSA epidemiologist and biostatistics Professor Adrian Esterman asked why we would continue to operate high-risk quarantine hotels in the middle of the city when it is safer to quarantine people away from communities, as on Christmas Island earlier in the pandemic.
“The only thing that’s causing these clusters is quarantine, that is the only thing,” he said.
“If we could solve that we’d basically be COVID-19 free.”
Inverbrackie Detention Centre at Woodside may be adapted for this purpose, or the Woomera Immigration Reception and Processing Centre near Roxby Downs.
“What you want is somewhere so isolated that the staff who work there, the cleaners, the kitchen staff, the security staff, actually live on the site, so they don’t bring it back home to their families,” Prof Esterman said.
“This is not unique or new, it can be done and the NT are doing it. Why don’t we do it in every state or territory and that would completely solve the problem?”
In the Northern Territory, COVID-19 quarantine takes place in a former 3000-bed mining camp, Howard Springs Accommodation Village.
Currently 1045 people are in quarantine at the Centre for National Resilience at Howard Springs, including 497 repatriated from overseas and 548 from within Australia, such as people from Adelaide.
A Territory government COVID-19 Operations Centre spokeswoman said health teams “remain on site and all non-clinical staff are full-time employees”.
“The National Critical Care and Trauma Response Centre continues to use PCR tests, which are the gold standard and most accurate to diagnose COVID-19, in line with national guidelines,” she said.
“Rapid antigen tests are in addition to the PCR and provide additional surveillance and can be done every 3 days.”
The National Review of Hotel Quarantine by Jane Halton, former Secretary of the Commonwealth Department of Health, was published in October.
The Review found options for new models of quarantine should be developed.
It was also recommended that the Federal Government consider the establishment a national facility for quarantine for emergency situations such as evacuations that could be scaled up at short notice.
Low risk cohorts, such as travellers from New Zealand, could be exempt from mandatory quarantine.
Epidemiology Professor Catherine Bennett of Deakin University would like to see national guidelines crafted for hotel quarantine that extend beyond regular COVID-19 testing of workers.
“Infection control protocols and monitoring, and pay rates with accompanying sole employment rules also need to be considered,” she said.
The Victorian COVID-19 Hotel Quarantine Inquiry interim report and recommendations released on November 6 states “every effort must be made to ensure that all personnel working at the facility are not working across multiple quarantine sites and not working in other forms of employment.”
Health Minister Stephen Wade said the South Australian Government worked with expert public health officials to keep the State safe and strong.
“We are constantly reviewing our medi-hotel procedures and capabilities and taking opportunities to improve them,” he said.
“We learned lessons from Victoria’s experience and recently subjected our hotel quarantine system to an independent, national audit - an audit that gave our services a gold star.”
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