We’re stuck with quarantine hotels. But can we fix the breaches?

The case against hotel quarantine was summed up in a phrase on Thursday when Labor foreign affairs spokeswoman Penny Wong went after the government for being too slow to improve the system.

Wong said hotels were turning into “coronavirus distribution centres” and causing massive lockdowns when they should be protecting the rest of the country from the pandemic.

Senator Penny Wong during Senate estimates.Credit: Dominic Lorrimer

The charge added a little more flame to Wong’s grilling of ministers and public servants in Senate estimates, but was based on hard numbers. Figures revealed in the hearings showed 21 breaches of hotel quarantine since the system was rushed into place more than a year ago.

The system clearly needs a fix. But it cannot be fixed in Canberra alone. Much as Wong wanted to dump all the blame on Scott Morrison, the truth is that state governments have a responsibility to strengthen quarantine, too.

The breaches are called “transmission events” and the first of them was in April last year when two workers came down with COVID-19 at the Duxton Hotel in Perth. The source was unknown.

But those infections did not lead to community transmission. Nor did most breaches over the months that followed, because the infections were kept to workers and their household contacts. In other words, the safeguards worked.

Six times, however, the infections spread to the wider world. In Melbourne, for instance, the city suffered from community transmission from the Rydges on Swanston in May last year and the Holiday Inn at the airport in February this year.

Of the other cases of community transmission from hotel quarantine, two were in Western Australia and two were in South Australia. This includes the man who left the Playford Hotel in Adelaide in May and carried the virus to his Melbourne suburb of Wollert, spreading it for days undetected.

Sydney appears to have fared better. The list shows six breaches in NSW hotel quarantine but no community transmission. Unfortunately, nobody can be sure the list is conclusive. Hotel quarantine could be behind two of the state’s outbreaks – the northern beaches cluster over summer and the eastern suburbs man who went shopping at Barbecues Galore.

Even so, the numbers suggest NSW has run a bigger hotel quarantine system with fewer problems than other states. Of the 385,600 people who have been through the system so far, NSW has quarantined about 168,600. That is 44 per cent of the total. And it has done it without a single statewide lockdown since the first months of the pandemic.

Victoria has put 45,900 people through hotel quarantine, so far. That is 12 per cent of the total.

The pandemic makes it brutally simple to compare political leaders and their governments because the measure of their performance is all in the numbers: breaches, cases, deaths. Case by case, outbreak by outbreak, Victoria fares worse.

Is the Victorian experience bad luck or bad management? Every lockdown makes it harder for the state government to blame the numbers on random factors.

Morrison, meanwhile, has been in denial on his share of responsibility. The Prime Minister argued for weeks that hotel quarantine was running smoothly with a 99.99 per cent effectiveness rate, as if the other 0.01 per cent was acceptable.

He stopped using that number in Parliament this week. Perhaps he finally noticed the anger from Victorians.

The problem with the 0.01 per cent is that the breaches are small but the costs are huge. Morrison is in a position to help with the two glaring flaws. First, healthy people are being sent into hotel quarantine and catching the virus there. Second, infected people are emerging from quarantine without being caught.

While Morrison and his ministers have been talking up the expansion of the Howard Springs quarantine centre for more than six months, progress has been slow. The centre, near Darwin, is still short of its 2000 capacity. Earlier this week it had about 1200 residents, according to locals.

The centre should be expanded to 3000, the figure mentioned by former health secretary Jane Halton in her review of quarantine, but it will not get there under the federal plan. So it looks like a flagship for government complacency.

Why not build more centres, faster? On quarantine, as with vaccines, Morrison never projects any urgency. He has stopped saying “it’s not a race” when he talks about the vaccine rollout, but he stopped too late. He has basically told voters he is not in a rush.

Prime Minister Scott Morrison.Credit: Alex Ellinghausen

Too sure of themselves, Morrison and his ministers thought they could blame the states and not do more themselves. That was clear when Defence Minister Peter Dutton dismissed the Victorian proposal for a new centre near Melbourne. Only later did Morrison wake up to the need to help the states build more capacity.

The Victorian project will become the template for a new approach: federal funding, state management, with Morrison now seeking construction as soon as possible. A deal is so close there is talk it could be done on Friday.

This is not a pathway to replacing hotel quarantine, only augmenting it. Morrison’s public remarks reflect his private conviction: he believes hotel quarantine is a good system. The debate should be about how to change it, not junk it.

One option? Make it three weeks. The incubation period for COVID-19 can sometimes reach more than 14 days. Liberal MP Katie Allen, a paediatrician and the member for Higgins in Melbourne, made this point in Parliament this week, although she did not argue for three-week quarantine.

Many will not accept a three-week quarantine rule. In any case, longer stays might only increase the number of people who catch the virus in the hotel. So other options should be up for debate, such as mandatory COVID-19 tests soon after someone leaves hotel quarantine.

The other step has to be better contact tracing. What if the Wollert man had been tested sooner and tracked better?

There is a probability, tiny but guaranteed, that some of those who emerge from two weeks of hotel quarantine will have COVID-19. It may not have happened at Howard Springs yet, but it seems dangerous to assume it will not.

There is no easy alternative to hotel quarantine and its “coronavirus distribution centres” unless it is to turn away Australians who want to return home, stop international students coming in and slamming the door on other essential travellers.

So a fix has to be found, and it cannot be found in Canberra alone. Like it or not, we have to live with hotel quarantine. State and territory leaders have to do their part to make it work better.

David Crowe is chief political correspondent.