“It’s not a quarantine, it’s a detention”: a Quebecer halfway through her mandatory supervised quarantine in a Melbourne hotel on Tuesday testified to the extremely severe measures imposed on travelers by the Australian authorities.
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For seven days, Mariève Tanguay-Lessard has been “imprisoned” in a hotel room with her spouse and her two children aged 3 and 7 months.
“We have meals delivered to the door three times a day, we are not allowed to go outside at all, we have no balcony and no windows that open either”, says the one who traveled to Australia for three months to spend time with the family of her husband from Melbourne.
To illustrate the strict conditions imposed on them, Ms. Tanguay-Lessard mentions that she finally had permission the day before, after a long and complex process, to go to an empty room in the hotel for 45 minutes to play. with his son.
“We are watched a lot,” she notes. It is not a quarantine, it is a detention! “
The measures taken by Australian authorities as soon as travelers arrive at the airport have nothing to do with those put in place in Canada.
“As soon as we arrived in Melbourne, there were about a hundred employees dressed from head to toe. We carried out tests, we were asked to change our mask, we come to be picked up at the airport by bus and the hotel has already been decided for us, ”lists Ms. Tanguay-Lessard.
At the hotel, the couple even had to negotiate with employees to get a room that met the needs of a family of four.
Moreover, the couple has long weighed the pros and cons of a stay in Australia considering the mandatory quarantine in a hotel room, especially with two young children.
“If we didn’t have valid reasons, we would have changed our mind. We thought about it for a long time, that’s for sure, because of the price of quarantine, ”she explains.
This cost, paid entirely by travelers, amounts to nearly $ 4,500.
Should the federal government be inspired by the measures put in place by Australia, where only three new cases of coronavirus have been identified in the last 24 hours for a total of 28,780 contaminations since the start of the pandemic?
This is one of the options on the table, the Trudeau government has been repeating for several days, even though it is not known what specific parameters would be applied to travelers. In Quebec, the Legault government is getting impatient and asks Justin Trudeau to act quickly to prevent all non-essential flights or impose a mandatory quarantine similar to Australia’s.
For Ms. Tanguay-Lessard, there is a balance that must be found between Canada’s “not stringent enough” measures and the quarantine conditions in Australia.
“Here, it’s much too intense”, she judges.
She says that on her return home, she would much prefer to complete her quarantine at home.
“Why not take a test when you arrive at the airport?” she suggests. If we are negative, we can do our quarantine at home and, if we are positive, maybe there it could be more supervised. “
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