Friday 12 February 2021

Aussie tennis fans Covid-19 ban blamed on poor quarantine hotel management

 The state of Victoria has imposed a 5-day lockdown because of an outbreak of SARS/CoV2. Among the public gatherings banned is the Australian Open tennis tournament, which will continue for at least five days without the presence of fans. It is reported that the Kent mutation of the virus is responsible for the outbreak which started in a quarantine hotel. These hotels have been set up to enable the isolation of returning Australian citizens. The concept is being brought to the UK by the Johnson government, but, considering that the Victoria outbreak is not the first in an Australian quarantine hotel, perhaps it should be looked at again more carefully.

It has been suggested that the hotel air-conditioning system is at fault. Certainly, compromised air-conditioning systems have in the past been found to have spread bacteria, most notably legionella (a form of pneumonia). Unlike a bacterium, a virus would not normally survive long outside a host, but it appears that coronaviruses are particularly hardy beasts, surviving in aerosols for up to three hours or nine days on some hard surfaces. My thoughts immediately turned to the spread in the DVL building in Morriston which incorporated a (novel for the time, as I recall) combined heating, ventilating and air-conditioning (HVAC) system when it was built. 

However, there was some reassurance in this paper from the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC) which suggests that well-designed HVACs may actually be of help in impeding the spread of coronavirus. Interestingly, that paper fingers restaurants among other closed spaces as hotspots of infection, which rather makes a nonsense of the distinction made by ministers of health in both Westminster and Cardiff between pubs and restaurants when imposing restrictions.

 

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