Acting Hotel Quarantine Minister ‘confident’ as international travellers arrive in Melbourne
Victoria’s hotel quarantine program is up and running again.
It comes after the program was shut down for two months after COVID-19 leaked from a quarantine hotel.
The first flight of international travellers, a Sri Lankan Airlines flight from Colombo, touched down in Melbourne just before 4.30am.
They’ve been loaded on to buses and taken to the InterContinental hotel in the CBD.
Acting Hotel Quarantine Minister, Danny Pearson, says he’s “confident we’ve got this right”.
But he says there’s always a risk associated with hotel quarantine.
“We’ve taken out as many of the risks as we can but this is going to be a case of continually monitoring the situation, continually working,” Mr Pearson told Tony Jones.
So far, 46 per cent of hotel quarantine staff have been fully vaccinated against COVID-19.
Mr Pearson says all workers will be fully vaccinated in coming weeks.
“By the end of April every single worker in the program will have received their two shots of Pfizer,” he said.
International arrivals into the state are currently capped at 800 per week.
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Image: Nine