According to 26-year-old Hayley Hodgson, who spent weeks in a quarantine camp despite the fact that she never tested positive for COVID-19, being locked up in this manner is “like you’re in a prison.”

“It’s horrible. It’s a horrible feeling,” Hodgson told Freddie Sayers of UnHerd. “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.’”

Hodgson reportedly moved from one end of the country in Melbourne to Darwin on the other end to escape totalitarian COVID measures enacted by the Australian government but quickly found herself as a prisoner in her state’s “quarantine camps” even though she did not have the virus.

Australian officials first confronted her after one of her friends tested positive. Investigators found Hodgson by running her scooter license plate. They interrogated her and asked if she had been tested since she was a “close contact” of the now-COVID-infected friends. Hodgson, who had yet to get a COVID test, lied and said she had already been swabbed.