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(Image: AAP/Luis Ascui)

New COVID-19 cases in hotel quarantine are at long-time lows, puncturing the government’s weak justification for halving Australia’s cap on returning travellers.

NSW Health’s latest COVID-19 weekly surveillance report, released on Wednesday, shows that the past six weeks have seen a declining number of confirmed cases in arriving travellers. As the state is the destination of most arrivals, the figures provide the largest data set available for understanding hotel quarantine trends. 

The surveillance report shows that in the five weeks to June 26, there were 77 cases testing positive in hotel quarantine in NSW. The previous week’s report shows that numbers detected from screening travellers on arrival have similarly fallen, from a peak of about 14 in every thousand in early May, to one or two in every thousand now. 

During the April-May Delta surge there were nearly three times as many confirmed cases popping up in quarantine — 227 in the five weeks to May 8. In the five weeks before that, there were 122 cases. The April-May jump seems to have been broken by the decision to ban arrivals from India.

The result? The surge had largely dissipated two months before last week’s national cabinet decision to cut the arrival cap. 

Sometimes policy tweaks work better than cuts. The previous sustained run of low numbers in February followed the belated decision to adopt the widespread international rule requiring arrivals to have a pre-flight negative test.

The 50% cut from July 14 was announced as the headline part of “phase one” of the plan-to-have-a-plan announced by Prime Minister Scott Morrison last Friday. It was urged on by Queensland Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk and Victorian Premier Dan Andrews, and conceded with “disappointment” by NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian.

The tracking data suggests last week’s decision was driven more by “hermit kingdom” politics than by the numbers — and popular politics by some premiers: the COVID equivalent of John Howard’s election-winning: “We decide who comes to this country and the manner in which they come.” 

The normally politically sure-footed Palaszczuk has since been bombarded with a petition (promoted by News Corp) over her decision to travel to the Tokyo Olympic Games before returning to hotel quarantine in Brisbane — despite encouraging the cut in arrivals.

In announcing (and taking credit for) the cut, Morrison said the change would “reduce the pressure on quarantine facilities, due to the increased risks of the Delta strain of the virus”. It must have seemed good politics to him too, with this week’s Essential Poll showing that more than 70% of people consider quarantine a federal responsibility.

The NSW data shows that since March about half all hotel quarantine cases have been “variants of concern”, particularly Alpha (originally from the UK) and Delta (from India) strains. The peak of the Delta virus was in the April-May surge.

There are a few indicatioins that the cut may not last. The data confirms that once fully vaccinated, people are at low risk of infection in the community and on arrival.

The figures show that to June 26 no fully vaccinated person — and only three partially vaccinated people — have tested positive as a result of community transmission in NSW since May 22. These figures don’t include recent aged care cases. 

In quarantine over the same period there have been three positive cases of people who said they had been fully vaccinated overseas, and one who said they were partly vaccinated. It’s not clear what vaccine was involved in each case.

It’s likely to encourage the approach hinted at by both Morrison on Friday and Berejiklian on Monday for a two-track approach to overseas arrivals: a capped track with a mandatory 14-day quarantine for the unvaccinated and another facilitating vaccinated arrivals (separately capped or not capped at all) with some kind of shorter or home-based quarantine.

Morrison said he would begin a home quarantine pilot in South Australia and Berejiklian confirmed she was in discussions with him for some NSW-specific arrangement.