Victorian hotel quarantine worker tests positive, page-32

So, another worker in a 'quarantine' Hotel has got infected. Is anyone surprised? Never mind the wisdom of flying a few hundred people in to play tennis in the middle of a global pandemic, they are just plain old hotels.

There is no protection designed into them to manage people infected with a highly transmissable disease.

They aren't hospitals, some of them haven't even been clean. They've all got carpet instead of smooth, easy-to-disinfect floors, lots of soft furnishings, may have cramped elevators, narrow corridors, regular airconditioning.

The staff aren't trained as doctors or nurses, or even as hospital orderlies, so they have no training and no relevant experience whatsoever to draw on.

Probably have a two-bob mask, minimum wage, casual employment, and are just people doing a usually boring, low-paid job on auto-pilot, except now it is potentially deadly dangerous, as well - to themselves, their family and all their contacts.

Suddenly their grotty hotel is an infectious diseases hospital, only without any of the disinfection advantages, support, equipment, design, failsafes or trained staff.

The Commonwealth ought to spend a quid fulfilling the quarantine responsibilities given to it in our Constitution, instead of letting State Health Departments keep trying to do it on the cheap and let's face it, with mixed results.

For instance, start paying for some trained nurses to run the quarantine in these hotels to an effective standard, you know, the kind of quarantine where staff don't keep getting infected by the quarantined guests!

The later covid variants are even more transmissable and deadly than the earlier versions, so where is concomitant ramp-up in the strictness of quarantine?

Plodding along, one step behind evolving events is just not good enough. The health professionals require 'health' hotels, because they understand the danger.

The whole idea of quarantine is to treat inmates as though they are infected, so how is it that the 'quarantine' hotels do not operate on the same basis as 'health' hotels? It may seem superficially logical, but it simply is not.