Tone Wheeler
There’s no doubt that quarantining international travellers is the ‘debacle du jour’. Could there be a
design solution? This small proposal says yes, with a win-win.
At the beginning of the COVID outbreak the federal government was completely unprepared for the need to provide quarantine facilities. Which is surprising since it is their responsibility to manage quarantine and they even has a minister for it. But at the first National Cabinet, they had no plan whatsoever for quarantine.
It was up to Dan Andrews from Victoria to proffer the idea of using hotels as an interim solution, a suggestion he surely must rue, as mismanagement came back to bite him so badly. We now know that hotels fail because they are unable to be securely ventilated to prevent cross-contamination (discussed here). And still, a year later, the federal government still has no sensible plan for national quarantine facilities.