New variants of coronavirus considered too contagious for hotel quarantines

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.

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.

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.

“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. “

Australia, which has 25.8 million people, has recorded around 31,000 cases of the coronavirus and China, with around 1.44 billion people, has recorded around 104,000 cases, compared with 33.9 million cases in the states. United, which has 332.9 million people, according to data from Johns. Hopkins University. The low numbers are the result of an aggressive removal strategy from the two countries that has not been feasible in the United States given the rapid spread of the virus there, according to health experts.

Even with about 50% of the U.S. population vaccinated, there were still about 400,000 new cases of the coronavirus in the past month, according to Johns Hopkins. Australia and China have both registered less than 1,000 over the past month, and some local Australian officials have said they want to keep new cases near zero at least until a greater part of the population is vaccinated.

Australian health officials say the variant transmitted to the Adelaide hotel in May was Kappa, which was first identified in India last year. Some experts believe that Kappa is more transmissible than earlier forms of the virus. The infected man at the hotel only tested positive a week after leaving due to the incubation period of the virus, which led to the outbreak in Melbourne.

The highly contagious Delta variant has escaped quarantine hotels elsewhere in Australia. A miner who stayed in a Queensland state hotel contracted the virus and then went to the mine where he worked in the Northern Territory, which recently caused an outbreak and lockdowns, authorities said. In Melbourne, authorities believe a recent cluster of Delta cases came from a person staying in a quarantine hotel, but it did not spread widely as the city was already on lockdown due to the previous Kappa outbreak. .

One problem with hotels is air circulation. Ideally, each room would be at negative pressure, which means air would flow from the hallway into the room, said Kate Cole, president-elect of the Australian Institute of Occupational Hygienists. But in some buildings, air could flow from the room to the hallway, exposing staff in the hallway to the virus if someone in a room is infected.

“You don’t want positive pressure, where air escapes from a spare bedroom into a hallway and can travel to other areas,” Ms. Cole said.

Air filters, personal protective equipment for hotel staff, and vacant rooms between guests can reduce the risk. But a better design, according to health experts, would be cabin-style structures where each room has its own air supply and opens to an outside passage, not a closed hallway.

Australia has one such facility in the Northern Territory which was originally built to house natural gas workers and is now used for quarantines. Australian authorities have said they will increase its capacity for international arrivals from 850 to 2,000. More recently, the Australian government announced that it will build a similar facility in a suburb north of Melbourne, which may open at the end. of this year. Planning is also underway for facilities in the states of Queensland and Western Australia.

The 500-bed first stage of the facility near Melbourne is estimated to cost around A $ 200 million, which equates to around $ 150 million. But the investment could pay off. Economists have estimated that closures in major Australian cities are costing the economy hundreds of millions of dollars per week. The facilities could also have other long-term uses, such as emergency housing during natural disasters.

An Australian couple, Neil and Karen Chappell, began quarantine at a Brisbane hotel last week, after traveling from Thailand, where Mr Chappell works as a regional manager for an auto parts company. He said he would feel safer in a specially designed facility due to issues with ventilation and airborne transmission.

“I am the most scared I have ever had of catching Covid sitting in this room,” Mr Chappell said.

China has also relied on hotels to quarantine international travelers, but Zhong Nanshan, one of the country’s top epidemiologists, recently said these were no longer enough for the Delta variant, according to media reports. ‘Chinese state. China is now planning to build massive quarantine facilities in two southern cities to deal with the threat from the delta.

The first center will cover 2.7 million square feet and provide rooms for 5,000 travelers and 2,000 additional beds for logistics staff, according to a local government notice. Its opening is scheduled for September.

The new center will be more automated to reduce the need for staff to take temperatures, deliver food and collect medical waste, according to state media. Local public health officials have also said they want to build a quarantine facility further away from residential blocks and that can ensure the isolation of each patient or traveler from each other.

Some doctors have called on the Australian government to speed up the construction of special quarantine facilities. They say it took a long time for authorities to fully understand that the coronavirus is airborne and can spread via tiny particles in the air, not just large respiratory droplets which usually fall to the ground faster. and don’t travel that far. Air transmission makes ventilation more important, they say.

To alleviate the pressure on the quarantine system, the government also recently decided to reduce arrivals of commercial passengers and to experiment by allowing some vaccinated travelers to quarantine themselves at home.

The emergence of more infectious variants “makes us deeply regret not having built a bunch of specially designed facilities eight months ago,” said Tony Blakely, epidemiologist at the University’s Melbourne School of Population and Global Health. from Melbourne. .

—Sha Hua in Hong Kong contributed to this article.

Write to Mike Cherney at [email protected]