Who would have thought this time last week, as we were sipping lattes and being very woke in the sunshine on Fryers St, that this weekend we would be once again buying toilet paper and cancelling our trips to Melbourne, our wedding, or holiday in Queensland?
Such is the nature of the slippery and molecular COVID-19 beast that a door held ajar for too long in a hotel can bring an Australian state of 6.5 million souls to a grinding halt.
This latest outbreak puts the finger on the pulse of our COVID problem - hotel quarantine.
This is the perfect reality of the butterfly effect chaos theory. A Melbourne man in an Adelaide quarantine hotel stays next door to a man who is a close contact of a coronavirus-positive person. The Melbourne man returns to his Victorian home on May 4. Four days later he feels unwell, is tested and returns a positive result, on May 11. Experts scratch heads and examine CCTV footage to find the two men had opened their hotel room doors to pick up meals within seconds of each other. In those few seconds, COVID-19 particles from the close-contact man have spread down the corridor and infected the Melbourne man. As far as I can work out, that appears to be the scenario around the current explosion of COVID in Victoria. So it seems, until we can build quarantine facilities with COVID-safe ventilation, this saga of chaos and confusion will repeat itself ad nauseum.
There is nothing to be gained from pointing the finger at South Australia, or any other state, for the failures of hotel quarantine.Public hotels were built as places of relaxation for tourists or business conventions, not as medical isolation units for potentially infected people.As Dr Norman Swan of the comforting Scottish brogue has said, every state needs a dedicated isolation facility such as Howard Springs outside Darwin.Victoria has earmarked a site for a purpose-built quarantine facility in Mickleham, north of Melbourne. So far, Victoria is the only state to take this step.Now the question remains - who pays?Here it gets slippery.Under the 1901 constitution the Federal Government was given the power of human quarantine and so it has subsequently dealt with the Spanish flu and small pox.However, under an agreement between federal and state leaders in March, the states agreed to run hotel quarantine and to fund it.But does this extend to building an entirely new multi-million-dollar quarantine facility?While the Federal and state governments delay the funding and building of dedicated facilities, businesses are closed down, funerals and weddings and travel plans and countless other precious family moments are cancelled and mental health problems soar.Coronavirus is not going away.Meanwhile, there are two things we can do: get vaccinated and build fit-for-purpose quarantine facilities.Sounds simple, but in all things human, there is a time to stop talking and a time to start doing.John Lewis is a journalist at The News.
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