February 26, 2020

expert reaction to guests in a hotel in Tenerife being quarantined due to cases of COVID-19

Guest in a hotel in Tenerife, including some British citizens, have been placed under quarantine after a visiting Italian doctor tested positive for COVID-19.

Dr Bharat Pankhania, Senior Clinical Lecturer, University of Exeter Medical School, said:

“In an ideal world, we would quarantine the people who have had close contact with the infected people. However, it’s not possible to know who those people are with precision in this case. The safety net has therefore been to quarantine the entire hotel. That decision has been taken because we’re still in the containment phase. While guests are in quarantine, it’s vital that expert advice from specialists is being taken to maintain and regularly review effective infection control. If any of the guests become infected, it’s important that they are moved to a secure clinical area and are no longer accommodated in the hotel.”

Dr Stephen Griffin, Associate Professor Section of Infection & Immunity, University of Leeds, said:

“The quarantine situation in the Tenerife hotel is very unfortunate but feels very much like the right thing to do when considering the bigger picture. Whilst it is clear that many guests will obviously be keen to get home and may have people or businesses that depend on them, the fact that the Italian party spent several days at the hotel before being identified as infected means that the risk of spread may not be entirely insignificant. Much like the situation on the Cruise ships, hotels have numerous communal areas, lifts and access points that could conceivably represent a means by which infection may be passed on. As such, it will also be important to identify hotel guests that may have overlapped with the Italian party but who may have departed before the lockdown was in place.

“We should account for the fact that the hotel and island authorities may never have encountered a public health issue on this scale, and so may require time and assistance to attend to the needs of individual guests. Fourteen days is obviously a considerable time to spend in quarantine, and the psychological effects of this should not be forgotten. However, until the extent of the potential interactions that the Italian party may, or may not have had is understood, other guests begin, or fail to show symptoms, or extensive testing is carried out, the best advice for guests is to minimise contact with one another, to remain in their rooms as much as possible, and to maintain good hand hygiene. The wearing of masks may provide a limited barrier to infection, but also encourages wearers to minimise touching their faces, and to adopt good “etiquette” when faced with respiratory symptoms. Assuming the hotel air conditioning systems have been properly maintained, there is little evidence to suggest that these cause significant spread of viruses such as influenza, so it would be highly unlikely that SARS-CoV2 might spread in this way.”

All our previous output on this subject can be seen at this weblink:

www.sciencemediacentre.org/tag/covid-19

The SMC also produced a Factsheet on COVID-19 which is available here:

www.sciencemediacentre.org/smc-novel-coronavirus-factsheet/

Declared interests

None received.