Experts say flights should bring home infected Australians from India

Vulnerable Australians have been kicked off the first repatriation flight back from India after testing positive to COVID-19 and experts warn the same scenario will keep playing out unless the government brings back everyone, no matter whether they are infected with coronavirus or not.

The first flight to bring vulnerable citizens and permanent residents back from India since the travel ban was imposed will touch down in Darwin on Saturday, likely well below its 150-person capacity. On Friday, 42 of the passengers tested positive to the coronavirus and 31 of their close contacts were also barred from travelling.

Associate Professor Adam Kamradt-Scott, a global health security expert, said both the federal and state governments had a moral responsibility to let all stranded citizens return.

“We should be bringing them home, full stop,” he said. “The risk is that they will succumb to the illness and die.”

Labor foreign affairs spokeswoman Penny Wong said the situation was “beyond heartbreaking” for those Australians.

“This flight was meant to bring home our most vulnerable and it is deeply troubling that so many have contracted COVID while waiting for the Morrison government to act to bring them home,” she said.

The government halted all direct and repatriation flights from India at the end of April as a third wave of coronavirus overwhelmed that country’s health systems. It also banned people from transiting through other countries to get to Australia if they had been in India within 14 days.

More than 40 passengers scheduled on the first repatriation flight coming from India since the travel pause have tested positive for coronavirus.Credit: Trevor Collens

There are at least 9500 Australians in India registered with the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade as wanting to return, with more than 950 classified as vulnerable. They include 173 children separated from their parents.

DFAT is focusing on bringing those listed as vulnerable home first, including the children.

India recorded more than 360,000 cases on Thursday, taking the total to more than 23.7 million confirmed cases. The country has recorded almost 260,000 deaths, but numbers are widely believed to be up to five times higher as the country’s health system struggles to cope with the deadly third wave.

The positive test rate among passengers booked on Saturday’s flight is 26 per cent of passengers so far, more than seven times the rate for repatriation flights in March. If those passengers had returned, it would have taken the proportion of cases in quarantine above the country’s 2 per cent maximum limit.

But Associate Professor Kamradt-Scott said Australia’s health system was capable of coping with cases so the Commonwealth should bring all Australians home.

“We’re not at the breaking point, unlike the Indian health care system,” he said. “So yes, it means that there is a risk, obviously, of community transmission. That is a risk that we need to ... come to grips with.”

Government officials were seeing if other Australians could fill the empty seats, but that could be difficult given the more stringent testing requirements now applied.

Australia has started double testing all returning travellers in India before departure. They must return negative results to Australian-supplied nasal swab PCR tests and a negative rapid antigen test before being allowed on board a plane.

The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age have been told that prior to the temporary travel ban, some passengers were presenting fake test results.

Late on Friday, DFAT updated its advice to travellers in Sri Lanka to say double testing will also be required for all passengers bound for Australia starting from Saturday.

Associate Professor Paul Griffin, director of infectious diseases at Brisbane’s Mater Health Services, said it was a delicate balance but there should not be a blanket rule preventing people who test positive from returning.

“There may well be Australians that would be better managed in Australia, and who would suffer some significant negative consequences if we had a blanket rule that said ‘no one with a positive test could return’,” he said.

A government spokesman said DFAT would continue improving its processes for testing and repatriating people. National cabinet agreed on the two-test requirement and isn’t expected to make changes when it meets again next month.

Prime Minister Scott Morrison said earlier on Friday the pause on flights had worked, with the number of active COVID-19 cases in hotel quarantine dropping by 40 per cent over the past three weeks.

“The system is ready to respond,” Mr Morrison said.

“Had we not undertaken that pause, then I think we would have put ourselves in a position where [repatriation flights] just wouldn’t have been possible, not just for a couple of weeks, but months and months and months.”

Associate Professor Kamradt-Scott said Australians shouldn’t be making its people the responsibility of a foreign government.

“I’m probably angrier than I have been in a decade about how our government is treating our own citizens with regards to this,” he said.

Greens leader Adam Bandt said the situation was “thoroughly foreseeable” and Australians had ended up stranded when they most needed the government’s help.

The plane for the first repatriation flight left Sydney on Friday morning loaded with 1056 ventilators, 60 oxygen concentrators and other medical consumables, which will be used to help India deal with a horrific COVID-19 wave.

The flight left Darwin at 1pm and is due to land in Delhi at 10.30pm, Australian time. Returning travellers will quarantine in the Howard Springs facility near Darwin.

One passenger with a ticket booked on the flight, who spoke anonymously for fear of losing his spot, said the group set to board the first return flight had not all been told their final test results.

“We heard that news [via media] and now we’re very scared,” he said from his hotel room in Delhi.

The man said all the passengers had been quarantined in one hotel before the flight, and were told they would receive their final test results at 6pm local time on Thursday.

The man was in a group chat with other passengers on the flight and said the mood was “very stressed”.

“We haven’t been informed what our result is, they’re hanging us around from yesterday and I don’t think anyone slept last night because my phone just kept pinging all night,” he said.

Another would-be passenger, whose wife tested positive on Friday, was concerned they might have caught the virus in the hotel.

Australia’s High Commissioner to India, Barry O’Farrell, said those who weren’t allowed to board the flight would remain classified as vulnerable despite the setback.

“Regrettably, those people will have to return home [in India], will have to deal with the COVID that they have, or continue to isolate to prove that they do not have COVID,” he told the ABC.

With Rachael Dexter

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