 |
| 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'.
-------------------------------------------------------------
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.
Comments
Post a Comment