Cluster that caused the renewed restrictions stayed in a quarantine hotel at Melbourne Airport.
Victoria, Australia’s second-most populous state, including the capital Melbourne, went into a five-day lockdown on Saturday as authorities rushed to prevent a third wave of COVID-19 cases caused by the heavily contaminated British variant.
A new locally acquired case was confirmed in the past 24 hours, Victoria health authorities said on Saturday, bringing the number of active cases in the state to 20.
“Many people will be in pain today. This is not the position Victorians wanted, but I cannot have a situation where we look back in two weeks and wish we had made these decisions now, ”Victoria Prime Minister Daniel Andrews told reporters on Saturday.
Andrews said Prime Minister Scott Morrison had agreed to suspend all international flights to Melbourne through Wednesday, after five planes on the way, carrying about 100 passengers, landed on Saturday.
The cluster that caused the renewed restrictions stayed in a quarantine hotel at Melbourne Airport.
It is the third lockdown imposed on Melbourne. The first two lockdowns were implemented as infections spread in March 2020, and then in July, which took about four months.
The streets of central Melbourne, the state capital, and suburbs were nearly empty early Saturday, with people ordered to stay at home except for essential groceries, two hours outside of sports, caregiving or work not done at home can become.
Among the “essential” work was play at the Australian Open, the first Grand Slam tennis event of the year, running until February 21, but fans were banned through Wednesday. Thousands had to leave before midnight on Friday, sometimes in the middle of the games.
‘Soul destroying’
The lockdown, which has shut down restaurants and cafes with the exception of take-out, struck just as Melbourne had prepared for its biggest weekend in nearly a year, with Lunar New Year celebrations, Valentine’s Day and the Australian Open crowd.
Melbourne last year underwent a 111-day lockdown, one of the strictest and longest in the world at the time, to stop a coronavirus outbreak that resulted in more than 800 deaths.
“It is the busiest weekend of the year for us. I’m sitting here making heartbreaking calls to see if I can rebook them, ”said Will Baa, owner of Lover, a restaurant in hip Windsor.
“It’s pretty soul-destroying. But we are resilient. Just fingers crossed that it only lasts for a short period of five days, ”he said.
The Australian Open tournament continues on Saturday without an audience after the new lockdown order [Loren Elliott/Reuters]
More broadly, Australia is considered one of the most successful countries in the world in tackling the pandemic, in large part because of decisive closures and sealed borders for almost all travelers except a trickle of travelers. With a population of 25 million, there have been approximately 22,200 cases in the community and 909 deaths.
New Zealand also reported one death of a patient with COVID-19 on Saturday.
The person had been taken to hospital from quarantine for an unrelated condition and later tested positive. That case has yet to be included in the country’s total of 25 COVID-19 deaths.