The groups that caused the renewed restrictions stayed at a quarantine hotel at Melbourne Airport.
Australia’s second-largest state, Victoria, including the capital Melbourne, entered a five-day closure on Saturday as authorities rushed to prevent a third wave of COVID-19 cases caused by the highly infected UK variant. .
A new locally acquired case was confirmed in the last 24 hours, Victoria Health officials said on Saturday, raising the number of active cases in the state to 20.
“It simply came to our notice then. That’s not the position the Victorians wanted to be in, but I can’t have a situation where, in two weeks ’time, we look back and wish we had made those decisions now,” Victoria’s Prime Minister Andrews told Andrews on Saturday .
Andrews said Prime Minister Scott Morrison had agreed to stop all international flights to Melbourne until Wednesday, after five planes landed en route on Saturday, with about 100 passengers.
The cluster that triggered the renewed restrictions was housed in a quarantine hotel at Melbourne Airport.
It is the third blockade imposed in Melbourne. The first two blockades were implemented when the infections spread in March 2020 and then in July, which lasted about four months.
The streets of central Melbourne, the state capital and its suburbs, were almost empty early on Saturday, and people were ordered to stay home, except for essential shopping, two hours away. outdoor exercise, care or work that cannot be done from home.
Among the “essential” work, the game continued at the Australian Open, the first Grand Slam tennis event of the year that runs until February 21, which continued, but fans were banned until Wednesday. Thousands were forced to leave before midnight, sometimes in the middle of the game, on Friday.
“Destroying the soul”
The closing, which has closed restaurants and cafes except takeaways, worked in the same way that Melbourne had prepared for its biggest weekend in almost a year, with lunar New Year celebrations, St. Valentine and crowds of Australian Open.
Last year, Melbourne suffered a 111-day shutdown, one of the strictest and longest in the world at the time, to curb a coronavirus outbreak that left more than 800 dead.
“It’s the busiest weekend for us. I’m sitting here making 178 heartbreaking calls to see if I can get them to book again, ”said Will Baa, owner of Lover, a restaurant in the modern Windsor neighborhood.
“It destroys the soul a lot. But we are resilient. Only the fingers that only extend over the short period of five days were crossed, ”he said.
The Australian Open tournament continues on Saturday with no audience following the new blocking order [Loren Elliott/Reuters]
More generally, Australia is ranked among the most successful countries in the world when it comes to dealing with the pandemic, largely due to decisive closures and sealed borders to all but a string of travelers. With a population of 25 million, there have been approximately 22,200 community cases and 909 deaths.
On Saturday, New Zealand also reported the death of a patient with COVID-19.
The person had been taken to hospital since quarantine for an unrelated condition and subsequently tested positive. This case has not yet been included in the total of 25 deaths from COVID-19 in the country.