Big numbers coming in daily. Are we sitting on a ticking time bomb? Someone is going to fall over it’s clear. Well Perth has.
Looks like 3 or 5 day snap lockdown won’t be uncommon this winter. Just a matter of which states luck runs out next.
Obviously the events of what went on in Melbourne last year won’t happen. We drop the axe pretty quick. But 3 or 5 days still costs billions and is a massive pain in the arse.
All these cases in these struggling countries and people still want australia to roll the vaccine out more quickly. I say give as much of your covid allowance to these countries first. The death toll is going to be extraordinary if they don’t.
These situations really are infuriating, there has to be a better way to select who gets the seats based on circumstance, instead of the current setup of giving airlines most of the control.
Should make it like NZ where you have to register a hotel quarantine position and you get a flight that matches your hotel quarantine date.
It’s people who can afford it. It always has been. Under international law australia cannot just simply close its borders. They need to allow freedom of movement. The issue is the ones who cannot afford to get back to australia are stuck and the Australian government is doing very little to help them get back.
A controversial recommendation from the Australian government’s Infection Control Expert Group (ICEG) allows surgical masks with protective eyewear to be used in the routine care of patients with suspected or confirmed COVID-19, and those in quarantine, rather than fitted N95 masks.
The dispute between some of Australia’s foremost infection-control experts has spilled onto social media, with Burnet Institute professor Mike Toole replying to a tweet from federal government adviser Dr Nick Coatsworth that praised Australia’s hotel quarantine system: “14 leaks in 5 cities in 5 months is not just a few. It’s negligence and ICEG is responsible,” Professor Toole wrote.
Australian Medical Association president Omar Khorshid said surgical masks were not designed to protect the wearer from viruses.Dr Khorshid said people had been infected in Victoria’s aged care homes and hospitals because of inadequate protective equipment being provided. In February, Melbourne’s Holiday Inn outbreak led to a wider adoption of N95 masks – which are closely fitted to a person’s face and filter out any airborne particles – in Victoria’s hotel quarantine system, after it was revealed most staff, including some infected in the cluster, were relying on a surgical mask and face shield.
But Dr Khorshid said he believed most other states were still not providing airborne protection to workers.
Staff working at quarantine hotels in Perth, the centre of the latest leak from sites housing people who have returned from overseas, are not given N95 masks except for during aerosol-generating procedures, according to the WA Health Department, which said the masks were “determined to not be a current requirement”.
Caught a glimpse of this before I went to bed last night.
Victoria wants to take an extra 120 overseas students, actors and others travelling to the country for business into its hotel quarantine program each week on top of its quota of returning Australians.
The planned scheme will be funded by the firms seeking to bring foreigners into Australia, who will have to pay a higher than normal fee, and administered separately from regular hotel quarantine.
In a letter to the federal government seen by The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald , the Victorian government proposes receiving the extra travellers from May 24, who will go through quarantine in a different hotel from those housing the 1000 returning citizens and residents it is already taking in each week.
Acting Premier James Merlino cites Victoria’s hosting of the Australian Open as part of its justification to take in the extra travellers in his letter to Prime Minister Scott Morrison and said it would ensure important economic activity could return.
so it might be quartine faclities plus the youth jail?
No… it was being built to be a youth jail, but it will now cater as a quarantine centre instead. I believe it’s already half built.
I would say adjustments to the design are being made now. Expected to open within 6 months.
So $1000 each?
$10,000
Still not a lot of money really.
https://twitter.com/NSWHealth/status/1386848708466143233
NSW Health has provided an update on a COVID-19 transmission between returned travellers in quarantine at Mercure Hotel near Sydney’s Central Station.
An investigation into how COVID-19 transmission occurred between returned travellers who had been in quarantine at the Mercure Hotel has led NSW Health to reclassify one case, previously reported as overseas acquired, as locally acquired. Of the three returned travellers, two were family members and stayed in connecting rooms.
The third traveller, whose case has been reclassified as locally acquired, stayed in an adjacent room. All three people share the same viral sequence for the B1.351 variant of concern, first identified in South Africa. The investigation did not identify any further cases of transmission.