Excerpt from Crikey.com
For a start, there’s the obvious inconsistency. If you test positive to COVID-19, you are asked to quarantine at home. That is, the Australian government trusts you to do the right thing. By contrast, if you are returning from overseas and test negative, you are still required to stay in a three-star hotel for 14 days.
Up until July, this was all at taxpayer expense (Victoria and ACT have not yet stipulated any costs for returning travellers, but theses states are also not currently accepting international flights).
So to clarify: if you test positive to COVID, please stay home. If you happen to come from another country and test negative to COVID, you’re staying at the Rydges for two weeks.
It’s also baffling that, unlike other countries such as Singapore, the Australian government treats residents returning from every country the same way. If you come from India (92,000 cases per day) you are subject to the exact same requirements as if you came from Vietnam (one case per day).
Moreover, the quarantine period is excessively long. While the virus’ incubation period does extend to 14 days, the median time for symptoms to present is around five days. Taiwan, the gold standard of COVID management, requires only five days of quarantine for those returning from low-risk countries.
Then there’s the other issue: as Victoria showed, hotel quarantine is far from foolproof. It relies on a number of checks and balances and human intervention (not to mention, it’s expensive — travellers are charged around $3000 for the stay). While Victoria was the high watermark of incompetence, it certainly was not alone — NSW and WA have also had their own hotel quarantine issues.
Given Australia has (rightly or wrongly) pursued a policy of elimination, it would make far more sense to allow returning travellers to quarantine at home under strict conditions.
The most obvious would be to require a negative test: provide a rapid test upon return and then utilise a location tracker like electronic ankle tags (or the Singapore/Canada model, which involves check-ins via phone). If a person under home quarantine breaches quarantine (or has a guest in their residence), they would be heavily fined ($10,000+) and forced to spend three weeks in a hotel. Random in-person checks could also be used.