Hotel cases were from Brazil

ALL the international travellers placed in compulsory hotel quarantine during the first weeks of the scheme who tested positive for Covid had travelled from Brazil, sources told the Irish Mail on Sunday.

Those closely involved with the Government’s hotel quarantine system insist it has been a success at minimising the importation of Covid variants and cases.

A source familiar with the system told the MoS: ‘If these people were not quarantining, these people would otherwise have gone into the community.

‘Two weeks ago all the cases detected in quarantine were Brazilians and people coming from there. But the important thing is not where these people are coming from and their nationalities. The issue is the hubs they are using.

‘At first, people could come through the UAE but that is shut now. So then they started coming through Qatar. Now that is shut. The issue is the hubs. It’s the hubs that people are travelling through that are the problem… once one tap is closed people being people will find another way of coming.’

An Ireland Thinks poll carried out this week for the MoS shows there is massive public support for mandatory hotel quarantining of international travellers coming here.

Some 81% of those surveyed said they support the introduction of ‘mandatory hotel quarantine for some people travelling to Ireland’. Just 15% said they did not support mandatory quarantine, with a further 4% saying they ‘don’t know’.

Mandatory hotel quarantine was introduced late last month. At first, people travelling from 33 countries were asked to spend 14 days in quarantine even if they arrived here with a negative PCR test. There are now 71 countries on the list, including Belgium, France, Luxembourg and Italy, as well as the US.

The addition of more EU countries and America last week provoked a furious response in some quarters.

The millionaire businessman brother of Foreign Affairs Minister Simon Coveney branded the compulsory hotel quarantine system a ‘prison’. Writing on Twitter, Greencore group boss Patrick Coveney said: ‘Ireland is now officially shut off from US & most of EU with little hope of being able to safely source the massive levels of hotel “prison capacity” to sustain MHQ policy.’