South Australia will launch a trial of home-based quarantine supported by face recognition this week.
According to SA Premier Steven Marshall, the plan recognises that long term hotel quarantine is implausible.
“As the risk diminishes around the world, we want to do a trial for at-home quarantine,” he said. “We’re starting off this week with people coming from Sydney and Melbourne, just to trial it, before we take people in from overseas in the subsequent weeks.”
Mr Marshall said geo-location and facial recognition software would be used to track people who were quarantining. They will be contacted at random and required to provide proof of their location within 15 minutes.
“As we have more people in quarantine, it’s going to be very, very resource-intensive to have the police going around and checking, so instead we’re going to be using technology,” Marshall told ABC Radio.
“I feel very proud that in South Australia, we’re really using technology to do what we can to manage this coronavirus…I think this is another step forward using technology.”
Marshall didn’t say exactly how the ‘technology’ would function but it’s likely to use the geofencing and face recognition capabilities of users’ own smart phones and be driven through South Australia’s existing COVID app.
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