With Victoria offering to build a 3,000-bed quarantine facility in north Melbourne to help stranded Aussies get home, but that it will not be ready for eight months gives us a very clear indication that COVID around the world, with India a prime example, is not going way any time soon and also how important it is to do whatever can be done to maintain the Australian and other COVID managed countries bubble.
It is clear that some state premiers believe hotel quarantine is not safe for housing travellers, with the new proposed Victoria quarantine facility in north Melbourne to house up to 3,000 returned travellers at once, built from scratch in Mickleham and operated by the state government, with Victoria asking the Commonwealth to fund the design and construction of the site which would be on Federal land.
Acting Premier James Merlino, who is deputising for Daniel Andrews while he recovers from his back injury has sent the proposal to Scott Morrison and has asked for a decision by September.
It is reported that the facility would start with 500 beds and could be scaled up to have 3,000, with the location, next to an animal quarantine facility, had been chosen out of ten possible sites because it is close the airport and hospitals.
He said that it could be up and running by the ned of the year as the virus, is going to continue to be with us for some time.
Queensland has also proposed a quarantine facility west of Brisbane at Wellcamp Airport, but the Commonwealth has refused to approve it, saying it has not been given a detailed costing plan.
The proposal comes after the Federal Government released figures showing fewer than one in 10,000 hotel quarantine guests cause coronavirus to escape into the community, after WA Premier Mark McGowan called for a system overhaul, with a total of 140,355 travellers having been through quarantine since October 27 but the virus has leaked only 13 times, which converts into that COVID-19 has transmitted into the community from just 0.009% of guests, which may be low, but to the majority of Australians appears to be unacceptable.
However, some doctors say a better way to rate the system is to count the number of leaks resulting from COVID-19 positive guests and based on that method, about 1 in 200 cases lead to community transmission, or 0.5%, according to a recent paper in the Medical Journal of Australia.
An edited report by John Alwyn-Jones
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