Saturday, June 27, 2020

A third of international travellers refusing COVID-19 testing in hotel quarantine. What's the impact?

When I first read the headline I thought to myself, "why are people refusing to be tested for coronavirus?" Then I started to think is it just a headline to grab attention (we all get annoyed by people not towing the line), or does it really matter.

https://www.9news.com.au/national/coronavirus-australia-third-of-returned-travellers-victorian-hotspots-refuse-testing/3ef1d03e-d690-4a66-aea0-f24e63b31fdb

I then thought, "the best thing to do is look at the numbers and then you can keep things in perspective". As of writing this post I've not yet looked at all the numbers so until I finish this post I won't really know myself.

First the numbers. From the following post on the ABC site we get that since hotel quarantine has come into place there's been 63,000 people who have been quarantined.


Interestingly there's been 81,000 people who have entered Australia which means around 18,000 people have not entered hotel quarantine or around 22% of the people. These people flight crew, international businesspeople and defence members as they operate under different rules.

The next interesting figure is 62% of cases were acquired overseas.

Next, how many cases of coronavirus have we had and that number as of today is 7,595. Of those cases if we say 62% were acquired from overseas if means there were 4,708 from overseas.


Next we need to keep in mind hotel quarantine started on the Saturday night of March 28. As of March 28 there were 3639 confirmed COVID-19 cases. Since hotel quarantine started there's now 7,595 and thus there's been 3,936.

We can't be sure how many of the people who didn't get hotel quarantine are infected, but let's simply assume the proportion is the same. That means we get 3,936 divided by 81,000, or around 4.8%.

If you're a returned traveller quarantined in a hotel there's roughly a 4.8% chance you've been infected. That's a reasonable percentage.

However, if you've been quarantined for 14 days that means even if you did catch COVID-19, there's over a 97% chance you're no longer infectious. Potentially that means there's a 0.14% chance a returned traveller will be infectious after 14 days. Further, for the 30% who don't get tested, it means we're now down to 0.04% that one of those people is infected. That's just 4 out or 10,000 people.

Now we're talking about very low numbers and if the person is infected, they or people around them will develop symptoms and at that point, if the person was infected that will become known.

So really if you look at the number, and hopefully I've got the numbers right, the fact that people who are hotel quarantined don't get tested, it's not something that should be a concern. It really is just the media getting a good headline.

Personally I'd be much more concerned about the people who do not enter quarantine because the general public have no idea of what rules apply to them when they enter Australia. A simple search of Google shows there have been reported cases of defence force and airline staff being infected.

Kelvin Eldridge

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