New COVID-19 cases in hotel quarantine are at long-time lows, puncturing the government’s weak justification for halving Australia’s cap on returning travellers.
NSW Health’s latest COVID-19 weekly surveillance report, released on Wednesday, shows that the past six weeks have seen a declining number of confirmed cases in arriving travellers. As the state is the destination of most arrivals, the figures provide the largest data set available for understanding hotel quarantine trends.
The surveillance report shows that in the five weeks to June 26, there were 77 cases testing positive in hotel quarantine in NSW. The previous week’s report shows that numbers detected from screening travellers on arrival have similarly fallen, from a peak of about 14 in every thousand in early May, to one or two in every thousand now.
During the April-May Delta surge there were nearly three times as many confirmed cases popping up in quarantine — 227 in the five weeks to May 8. In the five weeks before that, there were 122 cases. The April-May jump seems to have been broken by the decision to ban arrivals from India.
The result? The surge had largely dissipated two months before last week’s national cabinet decision to cut the arrival cap.
Sometimes policy tweaks work better than cuts. The previous sustained run of low numbers in February followed the belated decision to adopt the widespread international rule requiring arrivals to have a pre-flight negative test.
The 50% cut from July 14 was announced as the headline part of “phase one” of the plan-to-have-a-plan announced by Prime Minister Scott Morrison last Friday. It was urged on by Queensland Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk and Victorian Premier Dan Andrews, and conceded with “disappointment” by NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian.
The tracking data suggests last week’s decision was driven more by “hermit kingdom” politics than by the numbers — and popular politics by some premiers: the COVID equivalent of John Howard’s election-winning: “We decide who comes to this country and the manner in which they come.”
The normally politically sure-footed Palaszczuk has since been bombarded with a petition (promoted by News Corp) over her decision to travel to the Tokyo Olympic Games before returning to hotel quarantine in Brisbane — despite encouraging the cut in arrivals.
In announcing (and taking credit for) the cut, Morrison said the change would “reduce the pressure on quarantine facilities, due to the increased risks of the Delta strain of the virus”. It must have seemed good politics to him too, with this week’s Essential Poll showing that more than 70% of people consider quarantine a federal responsibility.
The NSW data shows that since March about half all hotel quarantine cases have been “variants of concern”, particularly Alpha (originally from the UK) and Delta (from India) strains. The peak of the Delta virus was in the April-May surge.
There are a few indicatioins that the cut may not last. The data confirms that once fully vaccinated, people are at low risk of infection in the community and on arrival.
The figures show that to June 26 no fully vaccinated person — and only three partially vaccinated people — have tested positive as a result of community transmission in NSW since May 22. These figures don’t include recent aged care cases.
In quarantine over the same period there have been three positive cases of people who said they had been fully vaccinated overseas, and one who said they were partly vaccinated. It’s not clear what vaccine was involved in each case.
It’s likely to encourage the approach hinted at by both Morrison on Friday and Berejiklian on Monday for a two-track approach to overseas arrivals: a capped track with a mandatory 14-day quarantine for the unvaccinated and another facilitating vaccinated arrivals (separately capped or not capped at all) with some kind of shorter or home-based quarantine.
Morrison said he would begin a home quarantine pilot in South Australia and Berejiklian confirmed she was in discussions with him for some NSW-specific arrangement.
There are so many things wrong with this article, I assume I’ll miss a few. What relevance does the number of positive cases in HQ have?
The only relevant thing is how many people are coming in and how many beds do you have. So saying the peak was 2 months ago is statistical sophistry. Qld ran out of HQ beds 2 weeks ago.
Oh, and by the way, if you’re not willing to own the slur ‘hermit kingdom’, then don’t use it at all.
I agree – a poor piece of work.
Nothing wrong here though:
https://www.thesaturdaypaper.com.au/news/politics/2021/07/10/part-one-the-true-story-australias-vaccine-failure/162583920012026
Norman Swan: Well, the first dose of Astra doesn’t give you very good protection at all against the Delta variant, about 30% protection against symptomatic disease.
Someone needs to tell Warren or point him in the right direction
“The figures show that to June 26 no fully vaccinated person … tested positive as a result of community transmission … These figures don’t include recent aged care cases.” Aah yes, the Coalition-style statistical analysis – ignore any numbers that discredit your position, in this case the incidence of covid among vaccinated nursing home residents and staff.
I’m actually on the side of opening up (cautiously) to vaccinated arrivals, and we do know that you can still catch covid after vaccination, but the morbidity rate is hugely decreased.
But we don’t come to Crikey to read the kind of dodgy analysis that we can get in the Murdoch stable. Own the real numbers and make a case for them.
The statistics provided have been deliberately vague, such that the average analyst at home can do very little with them. The press corps, being largely innumerate, don’t know the right questions to ask. At the moment my analysis, hindered by late and intermittent data quality, suggests that seats that are Labor or rusted on liberal are being treated differently to marginal and slightly LNP seats. Meanwhile, the Labor seats of Wollongong and Shellharbour are being maintained in lockdown with zero cases or sites of concern in the last week and an half.
data show from Israel is that nearly 40% of new infections are in 10- to 19-year-olds, and nearly 12% are in 0 to 9 years old. So, 50%-odd of the cases are in people aged 19 and under.
Swan coronacast today
The article’s argument is flawed. The current Sydney outbreak demonstrates that even very small numbers of cases in hotel quarantine are a big problem because the hotel quarantine system is not fit for purpose. Out of the 19 Covid-19 cases in returned overseas travellers in hotel quarantine in the week ending 12 June (NSW COVID-19 weekly surveillance report) there was one immediate case of community transmission (the limo driver) which grew to a chain of transmission that now has Greater Sydney, NSW Central Coast and Blue Mountains in lockdown and tightened restrictions throughout NSW. That week the failure rate of hotel quarantine was 5% or, in Liberal-speak, a success rate of 95%. A Liberal MP on ABC’s Q&A program (1 June) boasted of a 99.9% success rate based on around 35 breaches in 380,000 returned travellers quarantined in hotels since the system began but that’s the wrong calculation. The real success rate is based on the number of breaches per the number of Covid-19 cases in hotel quarantine, not total returned travellers. Tired of politicians and journalists untrained in epidemiology (and unable to correctly interpret data) putting rubbish numbers out there.
Much better analysis than what is provided by govt or the media. Thanks CathyH.
Any quarantine system will eventually leak. All you need is one infection escaping.
But I agree that “better” arrangements can and should be made.
Vaccination is the only way out of this and at some point in time, with everybody vaccinated, are expensive quarantine facilities still feasible or even necessary?
I believe I am correct in saying that the prospect of a future pandemic is extremely unlikely, based upon the fact that no society in human history has ever had to live through two pandemics. At least not yet.
If I am wrong It would be good to be told when it has happened before?
Given this, will quarantine facilities we build now be white elephants in the future?
I believe I am correct in saying that the prospect of a future pandemic is extremely unlikely
Wow, you truly are incredibly ignorant and uninformed.
Wish I had your crystal ball.
Fear. Pure and simple is driving your opinion.
We need leadership based on science and an understanding of statistical likelihood’s.
Is this a typo. “..no society in human history has ever had to live through two pandemics“?
All pervading disease – but never 100% lethal – lurking in every nook & cranny has been the norm for humans since the Fall.
The halcyon daze of relative impunity that we in the West enjoyed in the last half of the 20thC was entirely due to the brief interregnum of plentiful & cheap antibiotics.
This made us oblivious of the lives even our grandparents lived when a dental abscess or scratch whilst gardening could kill.
Possibly. Yet the likelihood of back to back pandemics remains a statistical outlier.
Other medications will be discovered. Research doesn’t stop.
Lives wrapped in cotton wool is not sustainable.
“ The real success rate is based on the number of breaches per the number of Covid-19 cases in hotel quarantine, not total returned travellers. ”
That actually begs the question though.
If the number of covid 19 cases in a hotel was known then the problem would have already been solved.
The whole point is that you don’t know the number of covid cases in the hotel. It’s the ones you don’t know about that are the problem.
Not happy being a bunny in SA for Marshall’s experiment with home quarantine.
Anything risky should always be attempted using a smaller and less productive demographic. It’s common sense.
….whooooshhhh….
In that case it should be Coalition MPs upon whom Morri$in’s experiment is conducted
That would be scientifically meaningless – the experiment subject must bear some resemblance, however small, to a sentient human being.
Common sense dictates it should be tested on Coalition family members, there, that will take care of any experiment.
Yesterday, Saturday July 10th, SA dashboard records 1,990 essential travellers entered SA presumably from within Australia.
Yesterday 13 international traveller cases were recorded, with 1 from interstate, and 5 locally acquired with the contact unknown.
To date 625 cases have been from international travellers
https://www.covid-19.sa.gov.au/home/dashboard
Proportion fully vaccinated? Who knows.
And SA residents are amongst the smallest fully vaccinated in the nation!
Why are they the smallest – lack of nutrition, no surf, the awful Murray water?
Considering SA Libs plan to, or already are, allowoing foreign students to arrive and be quarantined in far better conditions than hotel rooms, how many will be vaccinated with the Chinese vaccines? Thailand’s health ministry said 618 medical workers out of 677,348 personnel who received two doses of Sinovac became infected with Covid from April to July. One nurse has died and another medical worker is in critical condition.
Overseas caps, it’s easy to do, and mostly popular, doesn’t cost anything, that’s enough for Scotty from marketing to sign off on it.