Man arrested after dramatic escape from Perth hotel quarantine
A man in Perth, Australia, escaped mandatory quarantine in a hotel by scaling down a rope made of tied-together bedsheets from a fourth-floor window, police said on Tuesday.
After arriving in the west coast city on a flight from Brisbane, the man had his application for entry refused under the state’s Covid-19 border rules.
The man was told to leave the state within 48 hours and taken to a hotel for temporary quarantine, but just before 1am local time on Tuesday “he climbed out a window of the fourth floor room using a rope made of bed sheets and fled the area”, Western Australia Police said in a Facebook post.
The police posted photos of the makeshift rope hanging from a window on the brick building’s top floor down to the street.
Police arrested the man across town about eight hours later, and charged him with failing to comply with a direction and providing “false/misleading information”. They did not disclose the man’s identity except to say that he was aged 39 and tested negative for Covid, nor did they give a reason for his alleged actions.
Australia has recorded far fewer coronavirus cases and deaths (32,120 cases in total, 1,360 active cases and 915 deaths as of 20 July according Johns Hopkins University’s tracker) than many other developed countries partly because it closed national and internal borders and imposed mandatory hotel quarantine for anyone arriving from abroad or – during outbreaks – another state. However, more than 13 million Australians are in lockdown amid worries over the spread of the Delta variant.
The policy has, however, brought with it a series of escapes, including a woman accused this month of climbing down two balconies and kicking in a door to evade quarantine in north-east city of Cairns.