A highly infectious strain of COVID-19 has landed in Australia, detected in returned travellers in NSW, WA, Victoria, and South Australia.
The strain is circulating in the UK, may be up to 70% more infectious than other widespread variants, and has contributed to the decision to put England and Scotland into another lockdown.
Australian leaders think the threat to Australia is so serious that national cabinet will meet tomorrow, weeks ahead of schedule, to consider how to strengthen hotel quarantine.
This morning NSW and Victoria reported no new locally transmitted cases in the past day.
A cause for concern
Victorian deputy chief health officer Professor Allen Cheng tells Crikey that pushing the national cabinet’s meeting forward showed officials were taking the super strain’s threat seriously.
“It reflects the concern there is about the situation overseas and how the systems in place across the country need to be strong,” he said.
Cheng adds that no matter how robust the hotel quarantine system is, there is always a risk the strain could spread to the wider population.
“Every system has humans in it and where there are humans involved there is a risk,” he said. “Our job is to make sure there are enough things in place to minimise these risks.”
The Victorian and WA governments want travellers to Australia to be tested before they board their flights, and Victoria wants all states to follow its lead in testing all international flight crews.
Cheng said states were scrambling to implement findings from Victoria’s COVID-19 hotel quarantine inquiry and the National Review of Hotel Quarantine, both released last year.
This morning WA reported a serious hotel quarantine breach where three health workers failed to wear appropriate personal protective equipment (PPE) while caring for an elderly patient from the UK who’d tested positive. It’s not known whether she has the more infectious strain of the virus, and the three workers are now also in quarantine.
NSW authorities believe Sydney’s Avalon cluster, which pushed the northern beaches of Sydney into lockdown and prompted other states to close their borders to NSW, is linked to a returned US traveller in hotel quarantine.
Should we shut the borders?
While some experts have called for Australia’s borders to be shut entirely, University of Queensland infectious diseases physician Paul Griffin tells Crikey officials need to focus on fixing the current system.
“We need to have a gold standard border control irrespective of the COVID-19 strain,” he said, adding that training the right people to man the hotels was crucial.
“We’re not there yet.”
Griffin also says that speeding up the vaccine rollout shouldn’t be a priority.
“We have a due process for good reason,” he said. “The message needs to be clear that the right processes have been followed.”
Mutant strains a common worry
Walter and Eliza Hall Institute epidemiologist Professor Ivo Mueller tells Crikey more COVID-19 strains are bound to emerge.
“By isolating and treating people, we’re forcing the virus to find other ways to transmit and become more infectious,” Mueller said. “From an evolutionary point of view, it’s not surprising.”
He says that while there is good evidence the UK strain is more infectious, it doesn’t seem to cause more serious disease. He also stressed other factors abroad were causing the virus to spread more quickly.
“We’re seeing a surge in the US and the UK because Christmas was a super spreader event,” he said. “More people were indoors and in contact with one another.”
Hotel quarantine was an ad-hoc response that we took to be the definitive solution. Hotels are not fundamentally built as infection control facilities. We’ve had a year to invest in more purpose built solutions, but have not.
Fed govt not wanting to waste money on building or renovating any facility for quarantine. Probably thought virus would die out end of year (approx). Business is good for hotels used for quarantine plus all ancillary costs. Plus the vaccine will save us all early next year – hooray!
Your opening sentence is the problem -“A highly infectious strain of COVID-19 has landed in Australia”
The reality is – ” A highly infectious strain has been imported into Australia , by the border policy laid out by the Federal government “
All the current infections have been imported -then spread locally . Border policy quarantine is the Constitutional responsibility of the Federal government. Yet the federal government keeps sniping at the States responses when in fact Canberra has created the problem
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Your second para Desmond. “The reality is . . . .” Check out ‘NT Independent’ and NT News sites. An excellent example of Feds duplicity ‘shielding’ their ‘own’ hotel quarantine programme whilst financing NT Health’s Howard Springs facilities. Territorians never told about Feds quarantine facilities and associated risks or about the true potentialities of Defence Dept international friends transiting through Darwin.
The continuing failure of Morrison and the LNP to accept their responsibility under the Constitution for quarantine. Its the same old story – when the going gets tough Morrison is in hiding along with his pathetic henchmen, Dutton, Hawke, Taylor, Frydenberg, and all of the rest of that motley crew.
How many times . . . GO EARLY – GO HARD! What drives LNP resistance? Yes money, but surely governance extends beyond power, greed, financial return. If not, just observe . . . .
reading the news, I commented to the better-half that Victoria is urging other states to quarantine flight crews … after a stunned silence, “why the f*ck aren’t they doing that already?!”
can anyone answer why this blindingly obvious procedure wasn’t instigated on day one?
Same conversations been going on in my house roberto.