Chief Medical Officer Professor Paul Kelly says his “heart definitely goes out” to the 9000 Australians stranded in India but the objective “has to remain to keep Australians in Australia safe.”
He told Sky News the state and territories agreed in the early days of the pandemic that two per cent of infections in hotel quarantine “would be a benchmark of concern that we should take action once we got to that level.
” Professor Kelly pointed out now more than 15 per cent of occupants in the Howard Springs quarantine facility were infected with COVID, more than 70 per cent of which were returned travellers from India. “So I think you can get a sense of where the issue was and why action needed to be taken,” he said.
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