Howard Springs is already being used. It is hardly a ‘remote isolation facility’ with decent hospitals and a decent size city with all their capability about a 20 minute drive away. You’re proposing Learmonth for goodness sake. Anything near to them that can deal with the sort of things we’re talking about? Imagine the outcry were we quarantining people in the sort of accommodation available at a bare base.
Oh but now you want to have staff on standby in case there is an outbreak, using the Flying Doc and introducing massive risk for them if they need to move people to a capital city hospital, doing FIFO for the quarantine the workers on site for the two weeks they’re working, then quarantine them somewhere else for two weeks (and what about the workers looking after these people who are now quarantining, what are the rules for them), before allowing them a couple of weeks back in the community? Plus you now need to organise a bunch of repat flights from all corners of the globe direct to this ‘remote place’.
Sure, we can solve this problem with truck loads of money and about 12 months to get suitable accomodation available at Learmonth for your idea. In the mean time we do precisely what with those trying to get back into Australia?
Come back to me when you’re fair dinkum dre.
The problem is that remote camps just won't have the capacity. Up until last week, international arrivals into hotel quarantine were capped at 4127 per week. This may increase on 15/2 but it is equally likely that WA will ask for a temporary suspension whilst it sorts out its outbreak of 1!
To get remote camps accepting these sorts of numbers per week (and even then we accept that this isn't enough), we would need a remote camp capacity of over 8000. Currently Howard Springs has a capacity of 600 which limits it to 300 arrivals per week though the government has announced a plan to increase capacity to 850. Those 300 per week are outside the hotel quarantine capacity limit.