But looking at the latest breaches they have nothing to do with arrival quotas.
1. The limo driver who started Bondi Cluster was transporting freight air crew, we need to be able to receive air freight, so reducing quota does nothing to address this. The fix is to stop using private car servcies for transporting air crew and use dedicated state run vehicles with vacicnated drivers as they do for passenger arrivals.
2. The mining cluster was started because Qld Health put a low risk domestic traveller into a leaky hotel with overseas arrivals. The domestic traveller should never have been required to go into HQ. Reducing arrivals doent address this.
3. The Qld hospital cluster started because they allowed non vaccinated person to work next to the covid ward. Again reducing arrivals does nothing to address this.
4. The community spread has been made worse by selfish people going to work with symptoms and not getting tested early enough.
It is not right for some states to force other states to also reduce their quotas.
As Australia (un)officially has a zero CV target. Then every case that appears arrives from overseas. One Fed Health Dept figure mentioned that there is one HQ breach every 250 (was it?) positive CV cases in quarantine since 31 October 2020. Halving the quota, ceteric paribus, should halve the time frequency for breaches.
A 50% reduction is significant.
You may have missed it but it was
confirmed Friday June 25th that the limo driver did NOT catch CV from the FedEx air crew. None of the air crew tested positive. The theory that was raised, before Brad Hazzard abruptly ended the media conference, was that he caught it at the Cafe in Vaucluse which has seen so many cases & fits the super spreader profile.
Domestic infected people, such as a domestic flight attendant, have spread the virus within Australia = need for people coming from an 'open infection' area need to be either stopped from entry (NSW approach as posted yesterday) or made to go into HQ. Agree, ideally purpose built facilities instead of repurposed tourist hotels are needed - but that requires the Fed Govt stepping up to the plate.
For some reason that's not happening. The NT Govt has been made responsible for operation of the so-called Federal centre outside of Darwin & the Fed Govt is/was to have no Federal staff involved.
I cannot understand why, given the generally rapid turnaround of international aircrew that prefab huts were not installed in international airport parking garages so there is no transportation required. The parking buildings are not being used much at all & on-site suitably created separate cabins would appear to solve nearly all issues/requirements set out by the Fed Govt for a Fed Quarantine facility. Perhaps as Federal Police would officially have legal juristiction = the reason why not done.
