Australia’s Victoria to lock down over British variant cases

The Australian state of Victoria will undergo a circuit breaker lockdown for five days amid fears the British coronavirus variant has spread into the community, state premier Daniel Andrews announced on Friday.

The state will lock down from just before midnight on Friday until the end of Wednesday next week, Andrews said.

There are 19 active coronavirus cases in Victoria.

Five new cases from the last 24 hours are all close contacts of infections linked to an outbreak at the Holiday Inn at Melbourne Airport, which was being used to quarantine returned travellers.

Though the confirmed cases are all among close contacts of known infections, the speed at which the British strain is spreading is making contact tracing increasingly difficult, Andrews said.

Secondary contacts were found to already be infectious by the time contact tracers reached them, authorities said.

Andrews warned that the “hyperinfectivity and the speed” of the British variant means authorities must assume there are further undetected cases in the community.

“It is moving at a velocity that has not been seen anywhere in our country over the course of the last 12 months,” he said.

Waiting to see if there are indeed cases in the community would put the state at risk of being locked down later until a vaccine is rolled out, he added.

Under the lockdown, the public will only be allowed to go out to shop for necessities, care giving reasons, essential work or permitted education or exercise for two hours per day.

They must stay within five kilometres of home and masks must be worn everywhere outside the home.

Victoria, Australia’s second-most populous state, in 2020 endured one of the world’s longest and harshest lockdowns, which in total saw the capital city Melbourne under “stay at home” orders for 112 days.

Andrews had put the state under a strict police-controlled lockdown on Aug. 2, when new daily infections were nearing 700 and there were 6,322 active cases.

Melbourne, a city of 4.9 million residents, only fully emerged from the tight restrictions on October 28.

On Friday, the premier warned that the current outbreak “is not the 2020 virus, this is something very different.”

The government had reworked the state’s hotel quarantine programme after 2020 debilitating second-wave, which was linked to breaches in the system.