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Trapped Travelers In Australia "Scream From Hotel" After Being Ordered Into Another 2 Weeks Of Quarantine
17 November, 2020
Today in "it's starting to look a lot like a prison-state using Covid as the excuse" news...
Harrowing scenes are surfacing at the Peppers Adelaide medi-hotel in South Australia, where travelers who were already in a 14 day quarantine have been told that they have to undergo the 2 week process for a second time.
This has resulted in guests screaming from their balconies to be released from the hotel, where some are being forced to stay despite testing negative for Covid, according to news.com.au.
The standoff comes as the country tries to deal with a local cluster of cases that has more than doubled. More than 4000 people locally, who are considered "close contacts" have been quarantined, as a result.
Professor Nicola Spurrier, Chief Health Officer, said: “These people have been advised to quarantine and they are being contacted on a daily basis for a symptom check. This is a huge amount of work, as you can imagine, to make sure that we are in regular contact with these people.”
The country has been able to identify 21 cases linked to one family cluster, which includes three young children and a baby. The state's draconian measures are coming after reporting 18 new cases yesterday and 5 new cases today. Including the hotel, there are now 34 active cases, with 3 of which coming from a nursing home in Adelaide.
The CEO of the Anglicare Brompton Aged Care Home in Adelaide called it his "worst nightmare". So far, all residents at the home have tested negative and are being tested daily.
The cluster was said to have started by a female cleaner working at Peppers, who then passed it to her family and two unrelated hotel security guards. It has triggered closures and isolation warnings across the area.
Second possibly only to some Asian areas, Australia has done well in limiting the spread of Covid throughout the country.
With just 27,756 cases and 907 deaths throughout the course of the pandemic, the country has been helped along by its geography - and the overreaching measures, like these, it has taken to control and and trace the virus.
The strain of coronavirus wreaking havoc on South Australia has particular characteristics that are most concerning to authorities.
As the state announced it was going into a full lockdown for at least six days from midnight Wednesday in a bid to combat the latest COVID-19 wave, Chief Health Officer Professor Nicola Spurrier explained the reason for the tough move.
“This particular strain has had certain characteristics,” she said today.
“It has a very, very short incubation period. That means when somebody gets exposed, it is taking 24 hours or even less for that person to become infectious to others and the other characteristic of the cases we have seen so far is they have had minimal symptoms and sometimes no symptoms but have been able to pass it to other people.”
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