NSW to scrap hotel quarantine for fully vaccinated travellers

The article did say home isolation for 7 days.  Based on our lockdown fortitude (I’m in Melbourne), 7 days home isolation after a lovely overseas sojourn would be an easy sell. Where do I sign up?

Well we are looking at more like 5-7 days not two weeks, it might even get to 'test and release' mode because at +80% there's a lot more protection out in the community, but I don't want us to all get side-tracked on vaccination and Covid spread etc! Anyway I would be very happy to be able to visit clients again or even go on a holiday and then come back to spend 5-7 days at home. I'm already working from home, and during lockdown we have all gotten used to online ordering of groceries, having a very home-based routine, so not a problem for me!

@AsiaBizTraveller, I see what you're saying and I agree with you. For me, spending time at home is no problem either and I've gotten used to online ordering of groceries and other items (even from the hardware store) too.

That stated, travel won't return in any significant way, especially from incoming foreigners, unless the quarantine is removed entirely. No tourist or business traveller will quarantine at a hotel, even if it's just for 5 days or so. What they might agree to is an "area quarantine" similar to Thailand (and starting soon, Phu Quoc, Vietnam). This involves being required to book a hotel for a minimum 7-14 day period but during your stay you're allowed to leave the hotel and travel around a particular province or provinces as soon as your test results are known (which should be on day 1).

There will be no single step from 14 day hotel quarantine to nothing.  If that is what you want, you'd best not plan on international travel for most of 2022.

7 day home quarantine for fully vaccinated arrivals with testing at Day 0 and Day 6 will be the starting point.  Hopefully, if stats show very low infection rate then the home quarantine can be reduced to 3 or 4 days.  It is probably unlikely that we will have zero quarantine until late next year at the earliest and, even then, it will be restricted to "green zone" arrivals.

This comment aged well.

You may not want to travel - no problem, but it might amaze you how many already are and will continue to do so.

@Reeves - that is nonsense. We literally went from no quarantine to 14 days hotel quarantine from one day to the next in March 2020. There is no reason why the quarantine can't be lifted from one day to the next, particularly if vaccinations work.

Other countries have reduced their quarantines from 14 days down to 7 or 10 days, depending on whether they arrive with a negative test result or not, or are vaccinated.

Malaysia, with far more cases than Australia, is down to 7 days quarantine for those with a negative test result, irrespective of their vaccination status. Those arriving without a test now quarantine for 10 days. Although still too long, it's a step in the right direction. This policy was implemented in December 2020, a full 9 months ago!

Why can Malaysia do this but not Australia?

I agree with flyboy that unless or until the quarantine has been removed entirely, few people are going to travel. Those that will travel are individuals who aren't coming back to Australia for a while, or have flexible schedules, allowing them to quarantine at home for a week, which of course is far more preferable to hotel quarantine. Tourists and overseas business travelers, probably won't come until the quarantine is lifted entirely, so planes aren't going to be filled.

Most flights in/out of Australia aside from New Zealand and Fiji have fewer than 50% of the passengers who are Australian citizens. In the case of flights to/from China, 95% are Chinese nationals or Aussies of Chinese origin, so those flights will be empty if they don't remove quarantine first.

Even with a one week home quarantine, there will only be demand for a fraction of the normal number of flights. Expect 2 flights to Bangkok a week instead of daily. One daily flight to Singapore instead of 5 daily. 5 weekly flights to KL instead of 4 times daily. 4 flights weekly to LA instead of 2 daily. Something like that.

Then of course you have the constant spectre of lockdowns, both overseas and within Australia upon returning. This isn't over yet.

Wow! I agree with you for once!

This comment makes the usual lazy assumption that people only travel for holidays. For the many, many people who have not seen family or loved ones for a long time now, the ability to travel at all will be greatly welcomed, whether there is a 7 or 14 day home quarantine upon return. 

Once international travel for Australian’s restarts it would take more than just increasing case numbers (which will definitely happen) to derail it and stop it. Economically the country has a trillion dollar debt that will keep borders open. 

It will get there. Increasing cases won't matter too much as we learn to live with it and vaccination rates increase.

@Pat I was actually thinking if you have a test before you hop on the plane, a test when you land you are probably are safer than walking the streets of Sydney or Melbourne.

Now that the majority of the east coast have many cases and vaccination rates are high, there is little sense in quarantine. Testing especially if you have symptoms is the way to go. If someone returns with Covid they just join the many who already have it anyway, they are no specific extra threat.

Richard it depends on where they return to. If they return to a place where there is no COVID then clearly there is a specific extra threat.

Exactly. We have tens of thousands of people who caught COVID locally and all their close contacts in home quarantine right now. So, why are we treating overseas arrivals so differently? I don't see how such inconsistent policies can be based on science and health advice.

Australia has a cultural obsession with locking people up who arrive on our shores for dubious reasons.

And that's returning Australians who can get a flight into their home city. I tried to get to Adelaide but could only get a ticket to Sydney, so I guess I'll be stuck with hotel quarantine there (despite being *triple* vaxxed). Same problem for people like cqtiger. There should be, for example, test on arrival with hotel quarantine for, say, three days, then you're free to go on to where you actually live. Even if another few days of home quarantine are required. (This is how it works in Canada for the unvaxxed - 3 days in hotel quarantine where you first land, and if your test is negative, you can continue to your home in another province and do 11 more days home isolation.)

Triple vaccinated? Wow.

Well, whenever NSW does transition to home quarantine (hasn't happened yet and no idea when it will happen) though they're hinting at November or more likely, December, when Qantas flights resume, that'd be the time to come home. As for SA, I thought their trial was now wrapped up? It's all very confusing.

If you are eligible to return to SA and be part of the home quarantine trial, just book a Singapore Airlines flight. Adelaide has always had far fewer international services than the other major cities.

Unfortunately I'm starting from the east coast of Canada, and finding a way to Singapore Airlines flights is more or less impossible. At present I have a 50-hour journey via Hong Kong to Sydney (AC+CX). Flights using AC+QR sold out a long time ago - as you say, there are very few people allowed into SA.

I'm pretty sure Cathay also flies to Adelaide, or at least they used to. During Covid everything has changed.

You're absolutely right, they did. They don't now, at least not that I could find. I tried to travel via Doha on QR, but I was too late. Talk of home quarantine only came up after I bought my original ticket to Sydney (via HND on AC+NH, cancelled when AC stopped flying there).

Richard the whole thing started with breaches in hotel quarantine in Sydney and lax borders with Victoria. Where the quarantine has been good there have been no outbreaks. The handful of cases soon became hundreds as Gladys has belatedly realised.

Firstly, in proportion to the number of handled arrivals, Victoria had more hotel quarantine breaches than any other state.

Secondly, it is a big difference whether we aim for zero cases or not. NSW and VIC have given up on achieving zero cases and are just "flattening the curve" now. That completely changes the risk profile. Hotel quarantine was necessary to achieve and maintain zero cases but it no longer makes sense in the new world where we can accept some risks.

Pasi I would prefer to flatten the curve at 50 or 500 than a thousand. Easier on the hospital system.

These are completely arbitrary and random numbers and their meaning changes entirely as vaccination rates increase. 500 cases a day might be a problem for our hospital system if the population is completely unvaccinated. But 500 cases a day are no problem at all when over 80% of our population are fully vaccinated.

For example, Switzerland has a similar population to NSW, has less than 70% vaccinated, very few restrictions in place and has sustained between 2,000 and 3,000 cases a day for quite a while now without overwhelming the hospital system.

Pasi I just read SwissInfo the government website and they say the hospital system is under pressure (their words) and they are tightening restrictions including vaccination passports for internal gatherings. So not quite as relaxed as you suggest.

Correct, because like many European countries, they are facing a huge issue with vaccine hesitancy. That's why they haven't even reached 70% yet. It looks like Australia will have no problem achieving more than 80%. So, we are in a much better position. But the point is, 2000 cases a day in a similarly sized population with lower vaccination rates can be sustained for quite a while. So your suggested 50 or even 500 is way too pessimistic.

Pasi you are far more optimistic on Australia’s health system capacity than Northern Europe’s including Switzerland. Sydney is completely overwhelmed with 1,000. With Switzerland it is 2,000. The more public health conscious Europeans and their superior health system accounts for the different points of being overwhelmed. By the way Switzerland’s COVID  success rate in the management of death rates, is nothing to be proud of.

Did I ever say anything about being "proud of"? I just picked a country that seems reasonably comparable to NSW.

Anyway, that's not the point. My point is, we can easily live with 500 cases a day ONCE WE HAVE A HIGH VACCINATION RATE because vaccines prevent people who catch COVID from getting seriously ill.

Pasi you have far more faith in the Australian health system vis a vis Europe than either I or most health ministers.

@Pasi, correct. Look at Denmark, ALL restrictions gone, vaccination rate is around 80%, and currently 300-500 new cases a day.

The last dedicated covid-19 hospital ward has also been closed, so the normal health system and hospitals are now dealing with those, who need to be hospitalised 😎

Kenneth the NSW and Vic system would struggle at that level hence my point about European health systems.

Sorry, but think you misunderstood it a bit Patrickk. Denmark has 300-500 people testing positive every day, but they are not going to hospital. Right now, there is less than 150 in total in hospital in Denmark, due to covid, hence why they have closed all special covid wards. The normal system can handle the few going into hospital. With the high vaccination rate, people don’t get seriously ill, so they just isolate at home. If NSW and VIC Health Systems can’t handle that, then we are totally screwed in AUS 🙈🙈

Denmark has dropped all restrictions quite recently. We will see how long that lasts as Iceland with the same population as the ACT dropped its restrictions in July after 85% vaccination rates, but now has reintroduced many of them, as numbers grew, threatening the hospital system. Denmark may find the same. The cautious easing proposed by various Australian jurisdictions makes sense from O/S experience.

I hope Denmark doesn't make that error by backtracking. Remember Denmark was one of the first countries in the world to introduce a health pass, which was in place for 6 months from March through to September 10th. They removed the health pass even before many countries started putting it in place (such as Canada, which is happening this month), Australia (very soon) and several countries in Asia. More than 70% of their adult population is fully vaccinated.

Remember also that throughout this crisis, northern Europe in general has had significantly fewer restrictions than Australians (particularly in the eastern states) have been used to so I don't really see Denmark reimposing these measures in the future. Their population has been very opposed to all these control measures right from the get go and it very much looks like they're learning to "live with it" just like in years past when hospital capacity in many countries has been stretched to the limit during bad flu seasons.

Just checked the Channel 7 news story made 2 days after the Danish health pass was scrapped. Over 80% of Danes aged 12 and above have been fully vaccinated; an even higher percentage than I remember reading several weeks back. Even in Sweden, vaccine uptake has been relatively high, at around 63% according to a report I read recently.

Patrick. Switzerland is already using vaccine passports on a limited scale. Indoor dining is one example. There are currently major protests happening in the capital, Bern.

It's worth remembering that the current outbreak started with an unmasked, unvaxxed limo driver ferrying flight crew from a FedEx freighter. Not a passenger at all.

@outthere1000. Forgive me, I’m not trying to start a massive debate/discussion, but, so far it hasn’t been 100% confirmed that the limo driver got infected by the FedEx crew. For some, international air crew are an easy target to point fingers at, as they can travel in and out of the country, under strict isolation rules and regulations though.

The Limo driver himself believes, he got infected in AUS itself.

As aircrew, I just feel “attacked “ every time I hear this argument. It might be right, it might be wrong, it’s not 100% confirmed, and not 100% denied.

So let’s stick to the facts that we know of shall we. Just my personal opinion, and we don’t have to agree 😎

https://www.msn.com/en-au/news/australia/we-may-never-know-how-limo-driver-got-covid-sparking-sydney-outbreak/ar-AALuB4g

Quite correct. It amazes me when I hear people get hysterical that vaccinated people are still catching Covid. They obviously have no understanding on how vaccines work. They are specifically designed to prime your body to better handle it when you do catch it and to drastically reduce the severity of the symptoms. 

We will all catch Covid at some point. Counting cases when we have high vaccination rates is pointless.

@Richard W, Can you imagine if we applied the same news conferences to the common flu............

UpUp if the flu was that infectious and overwhelmed the hospital system the same way, I would hope we had a press conference every day.

@Pat, Covid isn't going away anytime soon and we are in a new normal for life, it reminds me of the book "Who Moved My Cheese". Forget the past for get what was the past way of life, this is life now and I admire Gladys for being a realist. The hospital system will get challenged but it is in a good position to be challenged. Time to stop talking about the sky falling in and get those 15%ers vaccinated.

Richard it is not being hysterical it is about the hospital system. Iceland with 85% double dosed had to clamp down because the hospital system couldn’t handle infections in breakthrough cases. The same wth Scotland and Israel. The issue is the vaccination won’t stop you getting sick but it will stop you getting very sick and dieing but the hospital system can be still overwhelmed. Hence home quarantine and a couple of tests even for fully vaccinated.

WA and Qld hospitals are at breaking point now with zero cases. Instead of spending $50 million every single day on testing for no benefit, that money should be fully utilised to improve the health system in this country. 

Err why would they be at breaking point with zero cases?

Good question! But they are. It is to do with funding primarily and also management. 

Richard in one post you say testing if you have symptoms is the way to go which I fully agree with, while here you say it’s a waste of time. In NSW they’re finding people who don’t get tested are dieing at home. Testing is those with slight symptoms is the way to go. There are now treatments that if applied early enough will keep you out of intensive care and shorten hospital time, hence the importance of testing.

Richard counting hospitalisations with high vaccinations is essential to run a good public health system and knowing the percentage of cases in hospitals is an essential part of that. Otherwise you are flying blind.

That is too narrow minded. The health system in Australia is terribly funded and needs to focus on everything. Right now it is literally only looking at one thing. 

I know Gladys has many detractors, as all politicians do. But she is the only Premier to be more broadminded in her responses unlike all the other Premiers who are just desperate to not have any cases attributed to them while in power. 

GoRobin yup she let it get away in the eastern suburbs and this is where we are.

She is just a politician. She did not let it go. It’s a virus, it does not have any idea who Gladys is. Dan supposedly did everything correctly compared to Gladys, he even boasted about that. It made no difference. The virus will not be stopped and we all need to get used to that. 

Richard I would prefer Dan with 500 cases, annastacia with a handful, or Jacinta with 20-30 than Gladys with close to 1500

That's nothing.

Despite the hysteria, I'm currently in a country with around 9 times as many daily cases compared with NSW and significantly fewer restrictions in place. Gladys even says there will never be "zero Covid" and that it's an unrealistic goal.

At some point you've got to live with it, just like we always lived with the flu. I travelled extensively through SARS and bird flu back in 2003-04, never even noticed anything going on. There were no restrictions, no "green passes", "health passes" or "vaccine passports", no masks, quarantines, travel restrictions or business closures. I could freely enter and exit Australia and the only people who wore masks were some veterinarians on TV at chicken farms or doctors. Some people in Hong Kong and Guangdong wore masks, but that's it.

Those regions were not part of my itinerary, but I did spend a lot of time in Thailand, Laos, Vietnam, Myanmar, Singapore, Cambodia and other countries and didn't see a single person wear a mask.

Now things have reached a level of hysteria it's difficult to get out of.

Other countries apply the home quarantine rule and allow travellers to travel to their residence even if it's nowhere near the initial arrival airport. I think the UK is a case in point. Right now all is speculation, but presumably a returning traveller will be required to return home via the fastest means, whether it's by private car, rental car or flight to a regional airport, from where they'd be picked up by taxi or private car and then travel home on the most direct route.

I don't understand why returning vaccinated travellers wouldn't be allowed to get on a domestic flight with theoretically unvaccinated travellers. The vaccine is supposed to protect you isn't it? Sadly, there is a chance that within the next 2-3 months all air travellers, including domestic, may be required to be vaccinated. At least for a while.

Vaccination to fly is definitely coming in. It will be interesting to see the legal cases against vaccine passports for all aspects of life in the next 12 months. 

I can assure you that there will be a lot of legal challenges to the draconian vaccine passport. Denmark already lifted it and I hope that they'll be completely history worldwide within 12 months.

We certainly don't want to go down the social credit system road.

It’s interesting that the UK have also backed away from having some type of vaccine passport. 

Canadian provinces have already introduced / are in the process of introducing vax passports to enter non-essential businesses (and for air/ train travel). Support for these ranges from 64% (Alberta, in the middle of a catastrophic Covid outbreak) to 85% (Atlantic provinces).

Don't forget that the UK (or at least England) would fit in Victoria.  So the distances there are so much shorter for most people.  How much would it cost for a taxi if I live 600km from the airport?  Yes, it would be cheaper than hotel quarantine, but would still require one or more stops for toilets and food and drink.  Then the taxi driver has to get back home.

I would imagine employers would be used to the concept of working from home by now. The WEF even says it will become a permanent fixture for many, well into the future. Certainly I can't see any issue if you're a white collar worker who sits in front of a computer screen all day. That job can be done from anywhere. All you need is a computer and (if applicable) access to your work server.

It's the engineers, the mechanics, those who work in construction, medical workers, hospitality staff and anyone else who works in a role that requires them to be in their place of business that can't work from home. They're the ones who will be most impacted.

Interestingly our high performance staff can't wait to get back to the office vaccinated or not, the average employees are keen to stay home.......

There will always be people who will never follow the rules. Just deal with them, don’t punish the majority who will play nicely. 

Well said Richard. The last thing we want to see is a society where everyone is punished for the actions of a few.

The lack of fresh air is indeed an imposition, but the food is definitely not hideous - far from it. And I've done it twice, once in Sydney and once in Melbourne. I can't help thinking "first-world problem".

In my view the food was hideous and I was at the Marriott in Sydney. A person I know was in there at the same time and they tweeted a picture of the food, one comment was "what is that? I wouldn't feed that to my dog". You may consider it a first world problem, but if I am paying $3000, I am entitled to expect a better standard of food, not stale breads, burgers that would break a window if thrown at it. I posted a video of me hitting a muffin on a box and the muffin did not break. On two occasions I left the food outside the door. It's not as if that $3000 covers housekeeping or bathrooms being cleaned, etc. Would you like me to continue?

Well, I beg to differ. When you're paying $3000 or more, then you expect to get a good meal. I haven't been through it (thank God) but I have watched some YouTube reviews and from what I could tell, the food looks OK but on the cheap side. Think "no frills" brand kind of meals, which is kind of an insult. If I'm staying in a 5-star hotel, then I expect 5-star meals. Basically at least as good as room service quality.

Did 2 weeks 3.000$ quarantine last year at Park Royal Darling Harbour. The food was outstanding most days, and more than I needed, for the amount of movement/exercise possible 😎 absolutely nothing to complain about.

I was at the Amora Jameson in Sydney (where we had mostly gourmet meals, e.g., salmon teriyaki, twice), and Parkroyal Airport in Melbourne, which was less interesting but nutritionally better thought out (more fruit). One or two meals in both places less than optimal, but generally outstanding. Plus all dietary needs fully catered for without any mistakes.

Any dedicated quarantine hubs which get built will be massive white elephants. Even more money wasted. 

Richard those without homes go to will have to go somewhere and open air cabin places like Howard springs and wellcamp will be busy for most of next year and into 2023. Having good inexpensive treatments are close but not that close, so cabins for a week or two and tests are the way to go for the foreseeable future.

Sorry Patrick but no idea where you're getting that idea about 2022 and 2023 in light of Qantas resuming overseas flights in December 2021. They're not going to fly if hotel quarantine remains in place for the indefinite future. Other countries are opening up soon too, including SE Asian countries like Thailand finally expecting to fully reopen on January 15, with about half of its almost 100 land border checkpoints re-opening to travellers on that date too. The rest will follow in the weeks afterwards. Australia is not going to remain closed and require hotel quarantine for a full year after SE Asian countries reopen. That would be ridiculous.

Hotel quarantine in NSW will end soon, and the other states and territories will follow soon enough. Richard is right - those hubs will be white elephants unless they're used again in the future (which I hope to God will never happen).

My prediction is that starting in mid to late December 2021 (3 months from now) hotel quarantine will begin to be downgraded and replaced by home quarantine, for an increasing cohort of travellers. As we move into next year, we'll probably see a complete lifting of quarantine for arrivals from places like New Zealand and New Caledonia (the former was in effect between April and July this year under the travel bubble) and gradually be expanded to other countries over the course of 2022. Arrivals from other countries will quarantine at home at the beginning.

Freq, these cabin type hubs will be there for those without a ‘home’ or for the unvaccinated or those with a non approved vaccine (e.g from many parts of SE Asia); students and the list goes on. I agree that hotel quarantine will fade away as hotels are not good places for quarantine and they may prefer other sources of income.

"Those without an approved vaccine" forget about anyone from SE Asia or China coming then. Students from these countries will gravitate to America, where there are currently no quarantine or vaccination requirements for entry (although vaccination requirements for certain types of visas may be implemented soon).

Freq it seems you are in full agreement with me. If people don’t have home to go to then cabin type accommodation will be the way to go ( no hotel accommodation) and as you say it will be for some countries ( I’m thinking os South Asia and much of Africa here) through 2022 and I would argue into 2023. You are more optimistic than I on the rate of vaccine roll out in those places, and the new bugs that may be on the way.

Cambodia is near 100% vaccinated. They're now "hunting down" the remaining 100,000 unvaccinated adults to convince them to get vaccinated (see recent Khmer Times article for detail). Meanwhile 60% of 12-17 year olds are fully vaccinated, and they've started vaccinating 6-11 year olds too. The capital, Phnom Penh, is probably the most vaccinated city in the world. 99.6% of adult residents had received at least one shot and this figure is roughly 2 months old.

Asians are very obedient and governments in many countries in that region are rather authoritarian. Although some of them came off to a slow start, Cambodia, a country of 17 million much poorer than Australia, has vaccinated nearly all 10 million adult residents with at least 1 shot (98% to be precise), and 82% of this cohort is fully vaccinated.

Laos is at a 25% fully vaccinated rate; Malaysia is at 57%. China is at 56% fully vaccinated. Japan is at 53%. Only Taiwan and Vietnam are lagging, but they're catching up too.

Hi Matt – the headline on this article is pretty much what NSW Tourism Minister Stuart Ayres said: "hotel quarantine will end for people (who) are double vaccinated." Yes, the Govt hasn't set the timeline for that ending but the statement and intent is absolutely clear, that hotel quarantine will end for fully vaccinated travellers in NSW. That's the key take-away, and it's the story. The trial is part of that.

Yes of course that would be a start. Anything is better than 14 days hotel quarantine. Half this time in home quarantine would work for a lot of people, especially those needing to go on urgent travel that can't be postponed.

I'm sure that over time, if things go well and state and federal governments are committed to loosening restrictions to kick start the economy and get business and travel going again, that possibly within weeks of the restart of air travel and the switch to home quarantine, arrivals from certain destinations wouldn't even have to do that and could arrive completely quarantine free. Fiji, New Zealand and New Caledonia would be among the first to experience this.

Later on, arrivals from Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore and then the USA/UK/Canada/mainland Europe would follow suit. Then Vietnam, Thailand, Malaysia and India and so forth. Probably over the course of the first 6 months following the reopening.

Totally agree with you. Trouble is Politicians don’t seem to live in the real world and cause mayhem with unworkable policy’s!