After super-safe, high-tech quarantine in China, Canada's version seems `just for show'

Jialing Zhang has the usual complaints for someone flying into Canada under new quarantine rules.

The Montreal resident waited hours at a time on the phone from China trying to book a quarantine hotel room, racked up hefty cellphone bills in the process and feared that without a reservation she'd be barred from her flight.

Zhang, who was visiting a gravely ill mother in Beijing, is fine with the new requirement. But unlike most Canadians, she says she's seen hotel quarantining done much more efficiently, more safely and at less expense for travellers.

Her 14 days in a Chinese hotel on the outbound trip — with extensive infection precautions, attentive staff and high-tech organization — left Zhang scratching her head at Canada's “very casual” threeday version.

“I feel like (China's) quarantine actually meant something,” said the 33-year-old. What's being done in Canada, on the other hand, seems “just for show.”

The payoff for China was a society operating more or less normally, where eating out at restaurants, going to the salon or seeing a movie are all possible, she noted.

Zhang acknowledges that much of what China is doing to keep COVID-19 at bay, including mobile phone apps that inform authorities if someone may have been infected, would not fly in democracies like Canada.

“Forced quarantine is already a very difficult move in North America. I totally understand that,” she said. “(But) there are things they could learn, if not from China, then from Japan, from Korea. There's no cases there any more. … Are we really that prejudiced in North America, thinking that we know the solution, we know what's best?”

Countries such as China, South Korea, Japan, Australia and New Zealand that have similar quarantine rules for incoming travellers have among the lowest rate of COVID-19 infection in the world.

Canada's efforts, though, are complicated by more than just its relaxed experiment with hotel isolation. To keep a massive trading relationship with the United States operating, truck drivers and others crossing the border daily are exempt from any sort of quarantine requirement.

Born in China, Zhang moved with her family as a small child to Australia, where she is a citizen, and has been working in film post-production in Montreal the last three years. She made an emergency trip to China in October after her mother suffered a major stroke and doctors feared she might not survive. (She is doing much better now.)

The daughter knew little about the country's quarantine policy, but there was no requirement to book ahead and flight attendants briefed passengers on the plane to southern China's Guangzhou.

Key to the whole, paperless process, she said, was a QR code generated by WeChat, a mobile texting app that virtually everyone in China uses.

Once on the ground, there was no choice of hotel; passengers were assigned one and taken there by bus. The cost, not including meals, was the equivalent of about $820, less than Zhang just paid for three days with meals at a hotel near Toronto Pearson airport.

“Every step you go, they check your temperature, your QR code, make sure your documentation is ready,” she said. “Once you get to the hotel, they would spray this disinfectant on your suitcases, your shoes.”

Guests were given temperature checks twice a day.

Passengers could pay for room service at about $14 a day or order from outside restaurants, something not allowed in Canada. Guests at the Canadian hotels have complained about hourslong delays in receiving meals and angry confrontations with staff.

Requests for help were forwarded to staff at Zhang's Guangzhou hotel through WeChat, and usually brought a response within minutes, she said.

But hotel employees wore full personal protective equipment — what Zhang called “bio suits” — rooms were thoroughly disinfected after use and only quarantined travellers were allowed in the hotel.

In another Guangzhou inn, guests are served primarily by robots, she said.

The designated hotels in Canada host a blend of quarantined and regular guests, while staff are protected only with face masks.

“It's kind of concerning because we're all checking in at the same reception,” Zhang said about the Toronto airport hotel where she's staying. “I feel they really need to be protecting all those hotel staff, and I just feel they're not doing that. It's not helping with the spread.”

Indeed, the experience in Australia suggests that even much stricter, 14-day quarantine rules are not failsafe. When a guard in a Melbourne hotel was infected, the resulting outbreak caused 800 deaths and many of the country's 29,000 cases to date.

“Urgent improvements to quarantine are required,” concluded a study posted last month by researchers from Australia's University of Melbourne and the University of Otago in New Zealand.

Once Zhang got to Beijing, where her parents live, “everything was so normal,” she said. Still, before entering businesses people had to undergo temperature checks and display their QR code to verify they're COVID-negative, as well as scan the building's own code to make contact tracing easier, she said.

Anyone whose app indicates they have been in close contact with an infected person has to get tested, or receive a visit from the police if they don't, she said.

I FEEL LIKE (CHINA'S) QUARANTINE ACTUALLY

MEANT SOMETHING.

COURTESY JIALING ZHANG Jialing Zhang, left, of Montreal, with her parents in Beijing, says her 14-day hotel quarantine in China was more efficiently run and cheaper than the three-day version she encountered on returning to Canada this week.