HOWARD SPRINGS, Australia — On Day 8 of my two-week stay at
Australia’s only remote, dedicated facility for COVID quarantine, I called my
11-year-old daughter at home in Sydney to ask how her day at school had gone.
All I heard was a long pause.
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“Dad,” she said. “It’s Saturday.”
I looked out the window as if my confusion could be cleared by
the brown all around me — the single-story metal lodging, the pathways, the
bags of food that had just been dropped off by workers in face shields. It was
not yet 5 pm and they were delivering dinner?
Such is life in a former mining camp near the northern tip of
the country, in a place called Howard Springs — a temporary home for hundreds
of domestic and international travelers being forced to wait around long enough
to prove they are COVID-free.
Quarantine has been a physical and temporal in-between ever
since the first lazarettos were set up to fight the Black Death in medieval
Europe. The practice, as Geoff Manaugh and Nicola Twilley write in their
fascinating new book “Until Proven Safe,” is both a medical tool and “an
usually poetic metaphor for any number of moral, ethical and religious ills: It
is a period of waiting to see if something hidden within you will be revealed.”
My experience exposed more than I expected, about human nature
but also about the ways that the pandemic keeps pushing countries back into
their own peculiar currents of national identity. In the United States, it’s
individualism. In Australia, it’s the collectivist urge to protect the many by
treating the few as a potential threat, sometimes at the expense of personal
liberty.
Australia stands nearly alone in its bet on quarantine infrastructure
as a long-term answer to the pandemic. Two more camps, each with a capacity of
about 2,000 people, are being built outside Brisbane and Melbourne, and Sydney
and Perth may not be far behind. The sites, called “centers for national
resilience,” are an embodiment of the country’s commitment to "COVID
zero."
Officials maintain that these camps, which are mostly for
travelers but can also be used to isolate the contagious, are necessary because
hotel quarantine has repeatedly let COVID leak into the community. The current
delta surge that has led to lockdowns for half of the country began in June
with an unvaccinated airport driver transporting people back and forth.
Howard Springs, which has yet to have a COVID outbreak traced to
it since it opened last year, is the new model.
“If we quantify the risk of where we put people, I think Howard
Springs is the lowest risk,” said Peter Collignon, a physician and public
health expert at the Australian National University in Canberra. “Hotels are 99
percent effective, and for Australia, that’s the problem — they’re not 100
percent.”
That zero-tolerance attitude has kept COVID deaths far lower
than in other countries, while dividing Australia. Most of the travelers I met
in quarantine were from Sydney or Melbourne and were trying to get to Western
Australia or Queensland, states that had shut their borders to anyone from a
location with even a few dozen COVID cases. They would not let us enter and
quarantine at our own cost, even when fully vaccinated.
So we had to go to the Northern Territory, the only place in
Australia that would accept us. Howard Springs was what Malta had been to the
British Empire — a place to let someone else deal with the problem.
And we were among the last ones in. A few days after we landed
in Darwin, territory officials declared that we had exploited a “loophole” that
would be closed. Howard Springs could no longer be used as an extended layover
zone.
“The policy is popular,” said Paul Italiano, an energy
executive, who was moving to Perth, the capital of Western Australia, with his
family after a few years in Sydney. “When we get back, we’re probably going to
want to build a wall too.”
After all, he said, it had worked: Western Australia’s seven-day
average for
COVID cases during most of the pandemic has been, well, zero.
I wondered if an American like me could warm up to the approach.
Most of us in D block — where I was placed and could talk to a
few people at a safe distance from our rooms’ verandas — arrived feeling
irritated. Michael Nayda, a marine engineer who lives in Sydney but had a job
out of the port in Darwin, said he was frustrated with the people violating
lockdown rules and keeping caseloads rising. I was upset about the hassle and
cost. The extra flights plus the fees for Howard Springs (2,500 Australian
dollars, or $1,825, for 14 days, including food) seemed to make little economic
or scientific sense.
But at some point, I noticed an attitudinal shift. Maybe we’d
been softened by the desserts — the sharp lemon meringue, the lush chocolate
tart. One day, when the food delivery carts rumbled in, I peered down our row
and noticed that we were all craning our necks, leaning out from our little
balconies, like animals at a zoo.
“It’s a bit Pavlovian, isn’t it?” Nayda said. “The sound of the trolleys,
the paper bags.”
He was right. But it was also a shared experience. Many of us
fell into the same daily routine: up early, exercise outside, work or read, nap
in the afternoon, return to the veranda for sunset. There was a simple natural
rhythm around the most basic human needs — outdoor space and social
interaction.
It was a step up, Nayda said, from the solitary confinement of
hotel quarantine, which he’d endured earlier in the pandemic.
By the time I left on Friday, it wasn’t just my confusion over
week and weekend that made me pause. Australia also seemed to have lost its
sense of time and focus. It was letting the pandemic revive its most
fundamental urge since British settlement: anxious isolation.
The state-versus-state squabbles felt colonial. The quarantine
expansion hinted at a parochial fear of anyone not right next door. Last month,
Australia slashed its slim allotment for international arrivals in half, to
just 3,000 a week. There are nearly 40,000 Australians trying to get home.
Quarantine in
Australia, I realized as I walked away from the
camp, snapping a selfie for my daughter, is no longer simply a place. It has
become a state of mind. Hopefully it won’t be permanent.
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