Is Australia’s hotel quarantine system worth the risk as COVID variants spread? Here are the alternatives

Just weeks after the virus jumped hotel containment lines in Queensland and Western Australia, Victoria now finds itself in the hot seat.

The latest cluster of more than a dozen cases is believed to have spread through the use of a nebuliser at the Holiday Inn near Melbourne Airport.

“You can test everybody every day … but it’s a different challenge now, it’s not the 2020 challenge, it’s a very different virus,” Premier Daniel Andrews told the media on Friday, as the state was plunged into a five-day snap lockdown.

With the emergence of international variants of the virus throwing a new spanner in the works, questions are again being raised about some of the weaknesses of Australia’s quarantine programs, and how our lines of defence…