WHY CAN'T WE JUST USE HOWARD SPRINGS FOR ALL ARRIVALS????

Because the proposal to more-than-double the Howard Springs facility capacity up to 850 people wouldn't even handle South Australia's 530 arrivals a week. You would need seven and a half of them for NSW arrivals.

Between these 4 states (NSW, VIC, QLD, SA) you need accommodation facilities for 11,680 people (5,840 arrivals per week x 2 weeks quarantine). That's not even counting WA or NT, or the ACT diplomatic flights.

That's more than the entire population of the town of Bateman's Bay, by the way.

Even if we assumed every arrival was a family of 4 living in a studio accommodation with only 2 beds, that's 2,920 separate living units.

The largest hotel in Australia is the Hyatt Regency on Darling Harbour, Sydney, with 892 rooms. And it's fucking massive. Even if you added the entire Crown Melbourne complex (Metropol, Towers, and Promenade) combined at 1605 rooms, you're still 500 short of the smallest estimate

On a more realistic estimate you'd need 4500 rooms. Two facilities of 2250 would be more practical but then you have to double up on staff and staff accommodation.

Let's just say you have all 4500 in one spot. And we want a Howard Springs type facility with space between all units so people get fresh ventilated air and are not stacked into a tower. 30sqm is the bottom limit of an appropriate extended stay unit. 6x5 let's say.

Add 2m on each side for the distance between them. 8mx7m. 56sqm x 4500 units. 0.25 sq km for the accommodation units only. Then add in all the kitchen, waste, plant facilities. At least double that area. Plus the staff accommodations, and the supporting facilities for those.

(Of course all this is ignoring the advice to leave units three days between guests, let's say you could somehow magically ensure they were fully vented and disinfected within a few hours.)

Your very best hotel housekeepers can flip about 13-14 checkout rooms each, in one day - they can also only do that once in a while and will make your life miserable if you ask them to do that much too often. Let's say we get an A-Team and it's ten, every day.

But you also need to do a deep clean and disinfect of all soft surfaces, etc. So probably two each. At full capacity of this facility you're flipping 321 rooms per day, so that's a minimum of 60 housekeepers on shift per day. And over 7 days a week. That's 84 FTEs a week on staff

And those are only to cover departures. A room needs to be serviced at some point in the 14 days. Plus cover sick calls, public areas, "emergency" cleans, etc. 110-120 would get it done. Then the culinary teams. Have you ever seen how to feed 4500 people at once?

Of course that's only 4500 rooms not people. We're at nearly 12,000 people. You'd have to have at least 4 massive industrial (think aircraft carrier) kitchens. Plus allergen prep areas, etc. And then the delivery. You're looking at doubling that housekeeping count at minimum.

Then your intake staff; your logistics team who move massive amounts of food, consumable supplies, linens and laundries, etc in and out of this place. Maintenance teams for 4500 self contained units. Security guards. Drivers. We're into the thousands without even trying.

Each of these people needs to be in their own unit, and we probably need security for the staff accommodation because I have worked in hotels for nearly 12 years and people get up to *stuff* even in the smallest, simplest suburban properties lol.

And THEN we get to the medical staff needed. When you're dealing with the medical aspect, you need what amounts to a full hospital ICU in case a resident goes critical. If there's an outbreak within the quarantine facility it has to be capable of handling it.

In the midst of the Victorian lockdown, NSW Health were canvassing the public hospitals for nurses to go assist in Victoria as they needed extra support. Right now all on-the-ground health staff we have are state employed and they're not exactly overstaffed.

Where, exactly, are we getting the doctors, nurses, registrars, orderlies, to staff what would amount to one of the largest hospital facilities in the country, at times mostly idle but capable of spinning up to capacity at a moment's notice? Is it the state where this is housed?

Are all states and territories expected to send volunteers to work for - what, a year - in some remote encampment? Does everyone contribute proportionally? Is it on a rotation?

Sorry, bathroom break. Which does raise the question of sewage - how do you do the sewage infrastructure for a project like this in a short enough time that the pandemic isn't over by the time it opens?

Also we need an airport capable of landing at least 4 flights of 220 people a day, so bigger than 737-800s unless you did two a day from each destination.

But even if you got all that infrastructure down pat, somehow, for me it still comes back to the staffing of this facility. Ask any hotel GM how easy it is to find someone to work in a 'normal' front line hotel job in the Melbourne or Sydney CBD in non-Covid times. Go ahead.

Has anyone calling for a regional facility tried to hire a chef de partie in the last 12 months?

Now tell them they also need to work in some regional area, not go out on days off, live in a small unit without family nearby, and by the way you could possibly catch Covid at some point.

The fact is, we already have infrastructure for handling as many arrivals as we do, in places with staff already employed, multiple hospitals at the ready, and no infrastructure to build. It's our existing hotel quarantine system. What we need is continued review of process.

And there's no Australia that isn't in a state or territory, which means there'd be nowhere that a state or territory health system wouldn't have to deal with a leak or outbreak into the community.

Anyway, it was this or a thread on how hotel AC units operate. I can still do that one if you want.

Last point: the logistics described here only deal with arrivals as they currently sit. A fixed site isn't scaleable to increases without further development. We could add another thousand to caps by bringing a few more hotels into the system fairly quickly.