To be honest, I really don't see any benefit of the 3-day-hotel-quarantine except for milking off the students' money.
Why easing restrictions for international students attending a DLI with an approved corona readiness plan just to announce what feels like a month later they have to pay ~$2000 if they want to come?
We anyways have to pay for the transportation service provided by the college to get to our quarantine destination, so what is the point of needing to stay for 3 days for ~$2000 in that hotel if we could be surveillanced on the way to our quarantine stay and just wait for the result there? Why not increasing surveillance in general on those incoming students instead of urging them to pay ~$2000?
There are so many things I don't understand and could be handled differently.
There will definitely be clarification in the next days and HOPEFULLY international students will be exempted. AMEN
They tried the first type of quarantining but unfortunately people don't always follow their quarantine rules. Some schools also don't do a good job monitoring. The hotel fees are likely to make very little profits. You have the test fees, transportation that has to be specially outfitted, you have to have a driver 24/7, you need lots of PPE, plastic will line the floors, your cleaners need to deep clean all the rooms, you are providing food, you need security to make sure people don't leave, you need to separate the quarantine floors, etc. This isn't a simple hotel stay. Canada is a huge country. It becomes very difficult to surveil people when they spread out across Canada. Most people would refuse to where a tracking device like they do in other countries. Many Canadians and business have been on lockdown for quite a long time. The hospitals are finally seeing less admissions. Canada wants to try to minimize the risk of someone bringing in covid variant and it closing businesses that have finally opened to shut down. Those in Canada following the rules have had severe consequences so it isn't unfair that others have to take on some of the burden.
It would make no sense to exempt such a large travel category like international students. The government doesn't always make logical decisions but hotel quarantine doesn't make sense if it is limited to people where it is clearly tourism. The government has rolled out this program over a very long time so people could have changed their tickets.
