RUBY:

From Schwartz Media, I’m Ruby Jones, this is 7am.

Archival tape -- Dan Andrews:

“Because this is so infectious and is moving so fast, we need a circuit-breaker.”

RUBY:

The entire state of Victoria has been plunged into a five day snap lockdown after a new, more infectious strain of Covid-19 escaped from hotel quarantine into the community.

Archival tape -- Dan Andrews:

“It is so hyper infectious and moves so fast that it is presenting a very, very real challenge.”

RUBY:

Leaks from hotel quarantine sparked Victoria’s deadly second wave, but in recent weeks leaks have occurred across the country, leading to lockdowns in Brisbane and Perth.

Today, journalist for The Saturday Paper Rachel Withers on the concerns experts are raising about Australia’s quarantine system, and whether our key frontline defence mechanism against the virus is working as well as it should.

---

RUBY:

Rachel, Australia's international borders have been closed to the rest of the world for almost a year now, but every week a few thousand returning citizens are allowed to land back home. So can you tell me a bit about what the process is for someone who's coming back to Australia right now?

RACHEL:

Well, it's difficult. If you're one of the lucky ones who can afford a flight, as in has managed to secure one that doesn't get cancelled, and you board a plane from wherever you're flying from, you land at an airport in Australia, probably Sydney - which is taking the most international arrivals at the moment - and at the airport, you’re met by military and police. And after a bit of waiting around you're escorted and bussed to your quarantine hotel. You don't know where you're going, but most of these hotels are in the CBD somewhere and you're escorted right up to your room. And you stay in your room in the hotel for two weeks.

You can't leave your room depending where you are. You can't open a window, and also, depending where you are, you're tested intermittently throughout your stay for Covid. They'll leave your meals outside your door, knock, walk away so that they don't interact with you, and you do the same thing when you're done with your meal, you put it outside the door - you never interact with the person ideally.

And if at the end of the two weeks you test negative, you're allowed to leave and that's the end of the process. But if you test positive, you stay until the virus is cleared. And it's a system that was set up way back in the early days of the pandemic when a lot of the cases were coming from China, the US, and we didn't know anywhere near as much about the virus as we do now.

RUBY:

Ok, so can you take me back to when hotel quarantine was established? Where did the idea come from and how was it put together?

RACHEL:

So the hotel quarantine system was introduced in quite a rush last year. It was decided at a March 27 meeting of the national cabinet.

Archival tape -- Scott Morrison:

“States and territories will be quarantining all arrivals through our airports, in hotels and other accommodation facilities for the two weeks of their mandatory self isolation.”

RACHEL:

And it was left to the state and territory governments to arrange and manage the facilities, as well as how to enforce the requirements and what the rules would actually be.

Archival tape -- Scott Morrison:

“This will be enforced by the state and territory governments. The Commonwealth will be supporting them with all manner of assistance which will relate to the work done by the Border Force, logisticians…”

RACHEL:

Some relied more on police and military, others on private security patrolling the hotels.

Most of the capital cities have empty High-Rise Hotels right now, and that's what state governments have decided to use. But if you look at the Northern Territory, they're using a former workers camp, which is a bit more of an open air facility, people are in cabins, people are allowed to leave and go for walks.

And so basically we've got this patchwork of rules and systems and there's no consistent standard across the nation on how these places will be staffed, how testing will work, what kind of PPE the staff and police and military have to wear.

And despite the fact that our knowledge has increased and we've also got a new mutation of the virus circulating around the world, we're basically still using the same system that was established in that very rushed way back in March last year.

RUBY:

And Rachel since then there have been some serious problems with hotel quarantine, most noticeably in Victoria… first with the long-lockdown last year after the virus leaked from a number of hotels into the community, and now with the current lockdown which was sparked by this cluster at the Holiday Inn. But it's not just Victoria - we have seen quarantine leaks around the country, so how concerning are they?

RACHEL:

So over the past few months, we've seen the virus breach quarantine in Adelaide...

Archival tape -- Reporter:

“Authorities are scrambling to contain a Covid outbreak in Adelaide's North.”

RACHEL:

Sydney...

Archival tape -- Reporter:

“The covid cluster on the northern beaches has grown from five to seventeen…”

RACHEL:

Brisbane...

Archival tape -- Reporter:

“A Brisbane woman who tested positive to Covid-19 has been found to have the highly infectious UK-strain of the virus…”

RACHEL:

Perth…

Archival tape -- Reporter:

“Western Australia has a confirmed Covid-19 infection in a hotel quarantine guard.”

RACHEL:

And now Melbourne again...

Archival tape -- Reporter:

“Melbourne is on edge this morning, waiting to see if this covid cluster that originated at an airport quarantine hotel spreads into the community…”

RACHEL:

...and the leaks seem to be becoming more frequent rather than less.

Archival tape -- Reporter:

“Both New South Wales and Victoria are on Covid alert this morning after each state recorded a new positive case linked to hotel quarantine…”

RACHEL:

And concerns really reached a new height last week because we had a few guest infections in Melbourne and Sydney last Sunday. Former guest at the Sofitel Wentworth in Sydney tested positive on day 16. So two days after leaving quarantine. It's believed that person probably picked up the virus while staying in hotel quarantine.

And now we've got, of course, the cluster at the Holiday Inn in Melbourne near the airport. And there's been quite a number of cases that's come out of that. There's been workers infected, there's been guests infected, and it's led to another hard lockdown.

And so what's really worrying people about these cases is that unlike the earlier leaks, the virus seems to be circulating within the hotels. It's going from guests to workers and from workers to guests and guests to guests.

Obviously, none of the recent leaks have resulted in an outbreak on the scale of Melbourne's second wave. But people are worried that it would just take one worker to pick up the virus and have a high viral load to spread it out in the community.

And, you know, this is our most important line of defence against the virus. We have currently a population free of the virus for the most part, and we've got this small population in hotel quarantine. And that's the only thing preventing us from having another outbreak. And it just doesn't seem to be working like it should.

RUBY:

We'll be back in a moment.

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RUBY:

Rachel, the idea behind hotel quarantine is to contain all travellers returning to Australia for long enough to work out whether or not they caught covid-19 overseas and then if they have, to treat them before they’re released back into the community. But as you say, there is more and more evidence emerging that guests are actually catching covid-19 while they’re in hotel quarantine. So how is that happening?

RACHEL:

So the conventional wisdom up until this point has been that Covid is spread through droplets and contact, which means that a lot of the protocols we have in place in quarantine and even some of the things that have been implemented post reviews is focussed on preventing droplet and contact spread. So we've got hand hygiene, masks, people staying in their rooms basically and not having contact with other people staying in the hotel or working in the hotel. But a number of the latest cases are believed to be the result of aerosol transmission, which is something experts say hasn't been taken seriously or even addressed until now.

There's a very vocal group of experts who have been demanding we pay attention to airborne transmission, but we really don't have the right protocols in place to prevent that from happening. Airborne particles can travel between rooms. They can travel down corridors. And so there hasn't been enough attention paid to air flow and ventilation in hotels. And that's where attention is now turning to.

RUBY:

And when we look at the situation in Victoria now, is there a suggestion that the government hadn’t paid enough attention to the issue of aerosol spread, and that’s perhaps why the virus escaped again?

RACHEL:

Well, the Victorian government is now doing a ventilation review, so they have acknowledged that this aerosol transmission is a part of the problem here, but they've also pinned the outbreak on an infected guests’ use of a nebuliser, which is a medical device used by asthma sufferers to aid with breathing, and nebulisers cause users to exhale up to 10,000 times more aerosol particles than usual.

But when I spoke to one of the experts, the Burnet Institute's Michael Toole, who's a professor in international health, he said that the focus on the nebuliser was a little bit of a furphy.

Archival tape -- Michael Toole:

“We know that nebulisers are not safe to use during Covid. But that alone does not explain these cases in quarantine hotels in Melbourne.”

RACHEL:

The device alone doesn't explain how the transmission was able to occur between hotel rooms, nor does it explain all the recent cases we've seen.

Archival tape -- Michael Toole:

“The other thing you may have noticed in a hotel is there’s often an air conditioning vent at the end of each corridor. So, the person with the nebuliser creates this fog of particles, door opens, it goes out into the corridor, the vent could then basically push that fog down the corridor for six to eight metres.”

RACHEL:

Toole wants more focus placed on air conditioning ducts and positive pressure, which is the rush of air into the corridor when a door is opened, which is believed to be responsible for a recent case where somebody picked up the virus from a family across the corridor.

Archival tape -- Michael Toole:

“If we were in a hospital and a person with Covid was inside a room, they would establish negative pressure; if you open the door, the air from the corridor, or outside, goes into the room.”

RACHEL:

And while this is getting a bit into the weeds of hotel architecture, it underscores an important point, which is that these hotels are not built for this. In a hospital, positive pressure is reversed, meaning that air is pushed inside a room when a door is opened and an infection can't get out. But hotels are not hospitals and they weren't designed to be.

RUBY:

Right, so it seems like the Victorian government at least is aware of the problem - but are the officials who are in charge of quarantine starting to pay attention to that?

RACHEL:

Yeah, it is starting to change but experts are pretty frustrated that it's taken this long and this many cases to spark any scrutiny of airborne transmission.

Michael Toole said that there's been a stubborn resistance to the theory of aerosol transmission, even though there's been study after study after study into it, and he thinks that the expert group advising the national cabinet lacks representation from key occupations, including occupational hygienists, ventilation engineers and occupational physicians.

And concerns about ventilation and corridor traffic were already identified in a recent review into the Brisbane Hotel Grand Chancellor outbreak. They weren't blamed for the outbreak, but there were recommendations made about these things.

And none of that really made a difference down in Melbourne, which points to a much larger problem plaguing our quarantine system, which is that we have a lack of an overarching national strategy.

RUBY:

And I suppose that goes to the fundamental question here. Which is, is it the case that hotels are not actually the right place for a purpose that's as important as frontline quarantine? Or is the problem here the lack of national coordination to make sure that we are learning the lessons that we need to to make the system work?

RACHEL:

Well, I've spoken to quite a few experts here and read even more of them. And there's a whole range of opinions. Some people are really pushing for this idea of a national strategy or a national standard, something overseen by the federal government. And that's something Labor's also pushing for. But how exactly this works also varies, how much responsibility the federal government actually takes on here, like whether they are actually managing hotel quarantine directly, whether they're running the facilities, or whether they're just coordinating a national standard that's consistent across the states and is based on best practises that have been learnt from every single individual review that we've had.

And then there's also the school of thought that we should move quarantine out of the cities altogether, not having hotels full of quarantine right in the middle of densely populated urban areas, meaning that if it does get out, we have to lock down a city. You know, while it might have made sense at the beginning when we were in a rush to just put people into hotels which were empty, it might be time to think of something else here.

People who support this idea of pointing to the Howard Springs facility in the Northern Territory, which hasn't had a single transmission from guest to worker. This would obviously be a very expensive solution - custom building more sites like this or upgrading facilities that we have around the country - but it would be nothing compared to shutting down a city, which is what we currently have to do when we have an outbreak within a city.

RUBY:

Rachel, thanks for your time today.

RACHEL:

Thanks, Ruby.

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RUBY:

Also in the news today…

The Holiday Inn Covid-19 cluster in Melbourne grew to 16 cases over the weekend. Two new cases, linked to a worker at the quarantine hotel, were identified on Sunday. Both had been isolating since last week.

Meanwhile, NSW has recorded 28 consecutive days without any community transmission of the virus. It’s the longest stretch without local cases in the state since the beginning of the pandemic.

And in the US Donald Trump has been acquitted by the Senate following his impeachment trial.

A two-thirds majority, meaning at least 67 votes, was required to convict the former president. However, in the end only 57 senators voted guilty.

The acquittal means Trump is free to run again for public office.

I’m Ruby Jones, this is 7am. See ya tomorrow.