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The president of the Australian Medical Association, Dr Omar Khorshid, said the outskirts of major cities would be more appropriate locations for hotel quarantine, and they would need to be built to be fit for purpose. It’s something he has been speaking about publicly throughout the week.

He is currently speaking before the Covid committee hearing, which has just begun for the evening. On Saturday, he told Guardian Australia it was his personal view that hotel quarantine would be required until at least the end of next year.

“It’s about achieving the appropriate separation to avoid contamination to other residents in the quarantine facilities, and in particular, avoiding transmission of any infectious disease to the staff that are providing care in those facilities,” he said.

The facilities should still be within reasonable distance of healthcare facilities, he said, “because people do get quite sick, particularly with Covid, quite quickly”.

“It’s been suggested, and we agree, that the outskirts of major cities, maybe, are places where you could build an appropriate facility that would have access to health care.”

Khorshid added that he was concerned by vaccine hesitancy due to the combination of the slow vaccine rollout and communication around the AstraZeneca vaccine. He blamed “sensational reporting of a single potential side effect”.

“In a vaccination program that’s already gone out to getting close to 2 million people, it is really not helpful and it harms confidence, way out of proportion to the actual risk to any individual, it is really difficult to communicate a clear understanding of what a one in a million risk actually looks like.

“It is important to be transparent, but we’ve got to make sure we’re not being sensational in being transparent.”

Associate Professor Charlotte Hespe from the Royal Australian College of General Practitioners agreed.

“Because we have no Covid in the country, it’s hard for people to understand what that risk means to them when we just otherwise really seem to have a normal life,” she said.

“Whereas we know medically that what we’re trying to do is prevent the awfulness that is happening overseas, and I think we need some more conversation around that.”