Are Coronavirus Hotels Effective?

The Media Line — Three days after deciding to compel all travelers disembarking flights from Britain, Denmark and South Africa to go directly to “corona hotels” for quarantine, due to fear of the highly infectious COVID-19 variant spreading in the UK and other places, Israel will from 10 pm on Wednesday begin doing the same for everyone arriving from abroad.

Previously, arrivals from aboard who were required to quarantine were allowed to self-isolate, usually at home, if they had the right setup to do so.

The big question: Are the corona hotels effective in halting transmission of the novel coronavirus?

Israel has been experiencing an increase in coronavirus cases for the past month. For almost a week now, the country has been averaging close to 3,000 new infections per day and on Monday reached over 3,500.

No one, The Media Line found, seems to have data demonstrating the efficacy of corona hotels in stopping the disease from spreading. The Health Ministry, Defense Ministry and the Israel Defense Forces Home Front Command, which operates the corona hotels, all failed to provide statistics.

“In general, the best way to isolate is to stay at home,” Prof. Nadav Davidovitch, director of the School of Public Health at Ben-Gurion University’s Faculty of Health Sciences in Beersheba, told The Media Line.

“But, the fact is, some groups cannot always quarantine at home due to the density of their household. Someone with the coronavirus in a three-room apartment and a 10-member family cannot be expected to properly isolate. Thus was born the corona hotel concept,” according to Davidovitch, who is among the experts called upon to advise the government on how to combat the virus.

There are two categories of corona hotels: hotels meant to isolate those who may have been exposed to the virus, and recovery hotels, for those diagnosed with the coronavirus but who do not require hospitalization.

Early on, the experts examined the needs of populations that because of general larger household sizes, notably the Jewish ultra-Orthodox and the Arab sectors, would have more difficulty properly self-isolating, he noted.

During the first and second national lockdowns, the recovery hotels were a success according to one person who served some 60 days as a reserve soldier for the Home Front Command in various hotels, who was not authorized to speak with the media.

“I can tell you we received personal thank-you notes and phone calls from many of those who stayed in the corona hotels. I especially find this interesting because many of the thanks came from those from ultra-Orthodox Jewish communities who do not serve in the IDF and do not really understand its workings,” he told The Media Line.

Davidovitch, when asked why there were corona hotels in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem but none currently in the Arab sector, responded, “There is no real solution for the Arab population.”

Bearing this out, currently, nine of the top 10 Israeli communities with the highest rates of COVID-19 infection are in the Arab sector.

Prof. Faisal Azaiza, dean of the Faculty of Social Welfare and Health Sciences at the University of Haifa, commented, “The government and its various committees are insensitive and show a lack of seriousness to the needs of the country’s ‘other’ populations like the Arabs. It is an old story.”

“If the government had set up corona hotels in and near the Arab sector, say in Nazareth, for all of those who had traveled abroad to Turkey, where they most likely picked up coronavirus and brought it back to their communities, we would have probably stopped the infection chain,” he told The Media Line.

Azaiza said it was his sense that during the first national lockdown last spring, the Arab sector was successful in halting the infection chain by taking those who fell ill from the virus out of their communities. But he was cautious, saying he had no numbers and had not seen research to substantiate this.

“The Arab community is filled with doctors and nurses who are really on the front-lines fighting the pandemic. We know what do to. Unfortunately, the government is not taking a holistic approach to fighting the pandemic in our communities,” he offered.

Rabbi Sid Slivko, spiritual leader of the Bay Terrace Garden Jewish Center in Queens, New York, saw large differences between his two quarantines in the hotels in June and again in October, following trips outside of Israel.

“In June, I could leave my room for common areas, whereas in October I was very much quarantined in my room,” he told The Media Line.

“The only person I saw during my second quarantine period was the maintenance man who made me stay inside the bathroom when he came to fix the window,” said Slivko.