Why island quarantine constitutes an absolute requirement

The revelation that Victoria has been forced into a lockdown as of tomorrow due to an Indian escapee from an Adelaide quarantine hotel has made me think of something I thought of last year but have not written about yet. This is that – regardless of transport costs – Australia must develop isolated islands as quarantine centres regardless of cost so that dangerous diseases cannot spread.

The problem with non-isolated hotel-based quarantine is quite simple: that it is easy for an inadequately tested person to escape, and that if such a person does escape it is extremely probable that they will spread coronavirus into a large community. This is what happened during the disastrous escape from the Rydges and Stamford hotels last winter, which I discussed previously here, and happened again in Adelaide this month. It is extremely difficult to create a secure environment anywhere on a large continental landmass. Australia’s arid interior and drought/flood tropical north are remote enough to be difficult to escape from but suffer from extremely inhospitable climates and long distances to move those to be quarantined. Somewhere rural but closer to major cities is inevitably very risky as an alternative to the obviously dangerous urban hotels. Contrariwise, an island quarantine actually acts as a real quarantine so that nobody can escape. Quarantine on a relatively small island also offers the advantage of being easier for tracking those under quarantine, as people are kept in a relatively small area.

Places I have seen as potential quarantine islands are French Island or one of the Bass Strait Islands, which have the advantage over more northerly localities of a far more livable climate. Some of South Australia’s islands could also be possibilities: the climate there is hotter than on Bass Strait islands and thus a bit outside the 12 ˚C to 22 ˚C comfort zone during the summer months, although it might be back inside the “comfort zone” if wind be factored in.

The obvious difficulties of building a quarantine island are:

1. inconsistency of need – such facilities are likely to be out of use for long periods
   
2. difficulty of transportation and the environmental cost thereof
3. the direct environmental and cultural impacts that a quarantine facility will have

How to plan or eliminate these is a difficult question. Islands are by nature very vulnerable even if they often can remain free of dangerous invasive species (such as rabbits, cane toads or foxes), so that a permanent inconsistently-used quarantine area may be very damaging. This would be even more true if the diseases being quarantined actually affected the island wildlife, although paradoxically this is less likely in Australia than in most other places. Helicopters – except for people arriving by sea the only possible means of transport of potentially contaminated people to an isolated island like the Bass Strait islands – are very energy-intensive and expensive at the same time, a critical issue for a country with such a low-energy ecology as Australia. A large quarantine facility would be very disturbing for the small rural populations of islands like the Bass Strait islands, and would also severely affect tourism to them if needed in the summer.

Even if these are substantial costs, if combined with efforts to revegetate land and improve Australia’s abysmal emissions performance via improvements in other fields like non-emergence transportation, there could be mutual gains.