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In early May, two people quarantined in adjacent hotel rooms in the Australian city of Adelaide opened their doors seconds apart to collect their meals. Health officials believe this could have been enough for the virus to spread from a man in one hotel room to a man in the other by air transmission.
The man allegedly infected at the hotel then traveled to Melbourne, leading to an outbreak and the lockdown of Australia’s second-largest city, health officials said.
Cases like these and the spread of new, highly infectious strains of coronavirus have officials in some countries questioning whether hotels are the best place to quarantine returning travelers, even as the United States and the Europe are considering easing travel restrictions as vaccination levels rise.
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Australia and China are planning new specially designed quarantine centers that public health experts say will be more effective in preventing the virus from escaping. Others, like New Zealand, are considering similar measures.
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All three countries have used hotel quarantines, among other pandemic safety measures, to keep the number of cases well below those in other countries. But the new variants are so transmissible that health experts now fear the virus will escape more easily and require more severe lockdowns to be controlled, especially in places like Australia and New Zealand where the deployment of the vaccine was relatively slow. Australia has fully vaccinated around 9% of its population and New Zealand around 10%, according to Our World in Data, which also shows that around 16% of the Chinese population was fully vaccinated as of June 10, although the Commission China’s National Health Authority reports that the country has administered half a billion doses since.
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“It’s finally clear that the virus will still be circulating for a long time, and the new, highly transmissible variants may make it difficult to safely hotel-style quarantine,” said Amanda Kvalsvig, epidemiologist at the University of Otago, Wellington in New Zealand. “The challenges of preventing transmission in hotels have put staff and guests at risk of infection.”
Click to read the full article on WSJ.com.
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