Should hotel quarantine be moved out of the cities?
With international arrivals starting up and the increased threat of reintroducing COVID-19 to Australia, questions remain over the ability of the hotel quarantine system to keep people safe.
Adelaide is the latest state to develop a cluster that was linked to hotel quarantine.
The Parafield cluster has now grown to over 20 confirmed cases.
Acting Chief Medical Officer Professor Paul Kelly warned on Wednesday, "That is our major risk now of reintroduction of COVID-19 into Australia, as we have seen in Adelaide over recent days."
After the hotel quarantine debacle that started Victoria's second wave, have we learned enough to make sure this doesn’t happen again? Could there be a better system to safeguard everyone from another outbreak?
Epidemiologist Mary-Louise McLaws, a UNSW professor and World Health Organization advisor said, “This is not just the first [incident]. It really needs to be re-evaluated right now."
Many within the health sector are wondering if it would be better to move hotel quarantine out of our cities.
Maximilian de Courten, a health policy lead and professor in global public health at Victoria University's Mitchell Institute, agrees that "we certainly can do better", but he insists moving quarantine facilities to remote locations, like Christmas Island, is not the solution.
"We have still thousands of Australians wanting to come home, and they have family and they have kids, so to put them into a very remote island or location is very tough and has other consequences on their wellbeing."
Irit Jackson, 26th November 2020
