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‘It’s Inhumane What They’re Doing’: Australian Woman Details Her Experience Inside COVID Camp

   DailyWire.com
Passengers from Qantas flight QF110 arrive at the Howard Springs Quarantine Facility on October 23, 2020 in Darwin, Australia.
Lisa McTiernan/Getty Images

Australia’s efforts to combat the novel coronavirus have been shocking, with many saying that the barbed-wire-lined detainment centers for individuals suspected of having COVID-19 are downright dystopian. It may sound cliched, but new details of how individuals are processed into the camp show that the assessment of the camps is accurate.

On Thursday, The Daily Wire reported that this past week “three teenagers were arrested in Australia after climbing a fence to escape a COVID-19 quarantine compound in the middle of the night”:

The teens – aged 15, 16, and 17 – had all tested negative for COVID-19 but were being quarantined because they were close contacts of people who had tested positive. They were being held in a COVID-19 quarantine facility in Howard Springs, just outside Northern Territory capital city Darwin, Australia news outlet ABC reported.

Now, 26-year-old Hayley Hodgson recently detailed her experience being taken by authorities into the Howard detainment camp, a 2,000 person facility. Hodgson did not even have COVID-19.

Hodgson told UnHeard News that police came to her door and asked if she had a covid test. Hodgson admits she lied and said she had. Here is what happened next, according to Hodgson’s interview with UnHeard News.

“So then the police officers blocked my driveway,” she says.

“I walked out and I said, ‘What’s going on, are you guys testing me for COVID? What’s happening?” They said, ‘No, you’re getting taken away. And you have no choice. You’re going to Howard Springs. You either come with us now, and we’ll put you in the back of the divvy van. Or you can have a choice to get a ‘COVID cab’… I just said, ‘I don’t consent to this. I don’t understand why I can’t just self-isolate at home, like a lot of other people are doing.’ And they just said, ‘We’ve just been told from higher up where to take you. And that’s all that there is.'”

UnHerd reports that Howard Springs camp is advertised as “the safest and most functional design for quarantine in Australia.” Hodgson was told she would be able to leave once she tested negative at the state-run facility, but authorities kept her there for 14 days despite being tested three times. She was even threatened with a fine of $5,000 AUD — the equivalent of $3,510.88— for not wearing a mask at one point, she says.

Upon arrival, the Australian woman says:

“You literally get put on the back of a golf buggy with your bags. And these people are in hazmat suits and everything. They don’t want to come near you because they think you’re infectious. And they literally drop you to your room. And they leave you. They don’t come and say anything, they don’t check up, they don’t do anything. You get delivered your meals once a day. And you are just left.”

She adds:
“You feel like you’re in prison. You feel like you’ve done something wrong, it’s inhumane what they’re doing. You are so small, they just overpower you. And you’re literally nothing. It’s like ‘you do what we say, or you’re in trouble, we’ll lock you up for longer.’ Yeah, they were even threatening me that if I was to do this again, ‘we will extend your time in here.'”
Australia is currently building more camps similar to Howard Springs.

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