Tighten this shoddy system

Imagine, for a moment, that you’re an Australian flying home to Sydney or Melbourne during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Your return might well have been delayed for weeks because there wasn’t space for you in a government-approved quarantine hotel. Until a room became available, you had to cool your heels outside the country.

Once you do arrive at an Australian airport, you’ll be escorted by police or military personnel directly to a bus that will take you to one of those hotels. You won’t know which one you’ll be staying at until you get there.

Once there, you must stay for at least 14 days, even if you test negative for COVID-19, at a cost of $3,000 (Australian). You’re not allowed to leave your room unless there’s an emergency; there’ll be someone in the corridor to make sure you don’t try to cheat. If you fail a test, you can be required to stay for another 14 days.

And if you break any of these rules, you’ll be fined heavily. It’s no fun at all, but Australians overwhelmingly support the system as one way of keeping their country almost COVIDfree.

Contrast all that with the “mandatory” hotel quarantine system that went into effect in Canada on Feb. 22. It was introduced, far too late, as being this country’s answer to the Australian system, but already it’s clear that it falls far short of that.

Leave aside, for a moment, the fact that returning travellers to Canadian airports are required to quarantine at government-approved hotels for only “up to three” days — less time than it takes for the COVID virus to incubate.

So a person who caught the disease just before departing won’t be screened out before being given the green light to go home and self-quarantine there.

First consider that travellers aren’t actually supervised to make sure they go directly to their designated hotel. They can make their own way there via car, taxi, whatever, with no controls on whether they stop on the way, come into contact with others, and so on.

Some aren’t even bothering with that.

We learned this week, via the Canadian Press, that some travellers arriving at Pearson International simply refused to follow the hotel quarantine order and walked out of the airport.

Peel Region police didn’t try to stop them, but handed them fines amounting to $880 under Ontario regulations.

That, of course, is way less than the $2,000 per person the government advertised as the cost of that three-day hotel stay (in some cases it’s turning out to be less). So on a purely financial basis, it may make sense to just walk on by and pay the fine.

For the collective good, however, it makes no sense. The point of quarantines in general, including the hotel stay, is to protect the whole population, not just the person involved. Quarantine is obviously inconvenient, but it’s one of the many prices we must pay to defeat the virus. Those who choose to travel in the face of all official advice shouldn’t be allowed to evade the rules so easily.

For one thing, fines for ducking the rules should be much steeper.

The federal government’s website on quarantine regulations states this: “Failure to comply with this order is an offence under the Quarantine Act and could lead to imprisonment and/or fines.”

Those fines can go as high as $750,000, and a further notice says police can issue tickets of up to $3,000 per day for violating the Contraventions Act.

There’s no reason, in other words, not to make penalties for people who chose to walk out on their public-health obligations high enough to make that hotel bill look positively tempting by comparison.

It seems obvious from the lax rules and the even laxer enforcement that the Canadian government (unlike Australia’s) never really intended its hotel quarantine program to be a serious attempt at stopping the spread of COVID-19. It was aimed more at discouraging people from travelling in the first place.

But if we’re going to have such a system, let’s not turn it into a total mockery. Let’s start by making a credible attempt at enforcing it.

That would mean ratcheting up fines for breaking the rules to a level that acts as a real deterrent.

Quarantine is obviously inconvenient, but it’s one of the many prices we must pay to defeat the virus