Quarantine op-ed


Closed quarantine station, Portsea Vic

QUARANTINE

 This op-ed piece was submitted to 'the Age'  in mid-November. Unfortunately they will not publish anything that does not come from medicos. Since then several similar opinion pieces have been published in 'the Conversation' and elsewhere. There have been several more breaches in 'hotel quarantine' in NSW, Queensland and WA, and it has been described as 'leaking like a sieve'.
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One of Australia’s great advantages in dealing with the Coronavirus epidemic is the country’s longstanding experience with quarantine. For two centuries we have spending the equivalent of millions of 2020 dollars each year on keeping foreign pests and introduced plant and animal diseases out of the country. We built the state of the art Australian Centre for Disease Preparedness (formerly AAHL) in Geelong, with elaborate security precautions and internal pressure gradients, to prevent the escape of a number of potentially devastating diseases.

For human diseases also, we have in the past quarantined passengers arriving by sea in purpose-built facilities well-separated from population centres, with live-in staff and medical support. In Melbourne, the quarantine centre was in the no-go zone at the far end of Portsea where passengers could be offloaded as they arrived. Today when it is needed, it is a museum and a community recreation area. In Sydney, the Quarantine Station is at North Head, where ‘history tours’ and ‘ghost tours’ are a regular feature.

Today when it comes to a dangerous introduced human disease, COVID-19, we have behaved like blundering amateurs, unable to learn from past experience or even from recent mistakes.

It is hard to imagine why anyone would try to keep potentially sufferers from a lethal disease in ‘quarantine hotels’ in the middle of town, maintained by staff living freely in the local community who just walk in and out. It is a disaster waiting to happen, and happen it has, first in Melbourne costing the State billions of dollars, and now in Adelaide.

In South Korea, good temporary facilities were built within a month, before the disease even arrived in Australia. Yet Australia has done almost nothing in this regard, State governments have been happy apparently to farm this responsibility of care out to the private sector who have been quite unequipped to handle it. The declining ability of Australian governments to take direct action on their own behalf has never been more apparent.

The hotel program is not even particularly cheap. It has cost the Victorian government alone $195 million so far. It should never have been more than a short stopgap while proper facilities were organised, and at the very least it should have been done in out-of-town facilities.

If Australia wishes to retain its bubble status and not be putting out repeated spotfires with repeated public and medical panics, proper facilities with proper isolation of the kind enjoyed by our ancestors need to be restored or purpose-constructed immediately.

This is not a time for convenience in quarantine, but for proper planning and care. Otherwise we will continue to create new rounds of ‘ghost stories’ – at gross community expense.

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