“To date, just over 15,500 people have been successfully housed within the facility across both models,” he said.
Since December 11, 1555 cases have been detected in Australian hotel quarantine. A large proportion have come from India, with 324 cases and 210 in April alone. There have been 172 cases in people returning from the US, and the COVID-19 crisis in Papua New Guinea has also led to 108 cases detected in quarantine in Australia.
Health Minister Greg Hunt said this week without the pause on travel there would have been a further increase in cases in quarantine above the 2 per cent infection rate advised by health experts as the system’s threshold.
However, on Tuesday NSW Chief Health Officer Kerry Chant disputed the relevance of this number for her state’s system.
NSW’s Special Health Accommodation, which houses positive cases and returned travellers with other complex health needs separately to the police-managed hotel quarantine system, has 753 bedrooms across 639 apartments.
On Tuesday, there were 546 patients in the accommodation, leaving more than 100 apartments vacant.
A spokesperson for Sydney Local Health District said it was “continually reviewing its capacity”.
Premier Gladys Berejiklian has said NSW Police consider 5000 or, at most, 5500 people in the overall hotel quarantine system at any one time to be a safe amount.
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The state has a cap of 3010 international arrivals a week and there have been 47 overseas cases in the past seven days.
Victoria’s hotel quarantine system is running close to its capacity. It has a weekly cap of 1000 arrivals and the state has about 1800 people staying in its quarantine and health hotels.
Queensland is using just over half of the quarantine hotels it had in operation in August, with about 1200 rooms occupied across 16 hotels. COVID-19 patients are transferred to hospital.
“Capacity and the number of hotels can flex up and down depending on demand,” a Queensland Health spokesperson said.
In South Australia, roughly a fifth of the more than 1000 rooms in Adelaide’s medi-hotels, which house all returned travellers, are vacant. There are 32 cases in the Tom’s Court Hotel, which only houses COVID-19 patients.
Last month, when there were 30 cases in the hotel, the state’s chief health officer said there were 12 remaining rooms. However, capacity depends on whether cases are travelling solo or as families.
Returned travellers in Western Australia’s quarantine hotels who test positive are not transferred to a new location.
A spokesperson for the State Health Incident Coordination Centre said there were 1895 people in quarantine in Western Australia as of Monday afternoon, of which 26 have tested positive.
