The group that caused the renewed restrictions was to stay in a quarantine hotel at Melbourne Airport.
Australia’s second-most populous state, Victoria, including the capital Melbourne, entered a five-day lockout on Saturday when authorities rushed to prevent a third wave of COVID-19 cases highly contaminated by the British infection.
One new case obtained locally has been confirmed in the past 24 hours, Victoria health authorities said Saturday, taking the number of active cases in the state to 20.
‘A lot of people will get hurt today. “This is not the position Victorians wanted to be in, but I do not see a situation in which we can look back in two weeks’ time and wish we had made these decisions now,” Victoria Premier Daniel Andrews told reporters on Saturday. .
Andrews said Prime Minister Scott Morrison had agreed to suspend all international flights to Melbourne until Wednesday, after five planes landed en route, with about 100 passengers, on Saturday.
The group that caused the renewed restrictions was to stay in a quarantine hotel at Melbourne Airport.
This is the third exclusion imposed on Melbourne. The first two closures were implemented when infections spread in March 2020, and then in July, which lasted about four months.
Streets in downtown Melbourne, the state capital, and its suburbs were almost empty early Saturday morning, and people were ordered to stay home, except for essential shopping, two hours of outdoor exercise, grooming or work that could not be done at home not.
Under the ‘essential’ work, play continued at the Australian Open, the first Grand Slam tennis event to last until February 21, but fans were banned until Wednesday. Thousands had to leave before midnight on Friday, sometimes in the middle of matches.
‘Soul destroyed’
The exclusion, which closed restaurants and cafes except for takeaways, struck just as Melbourne was poised for the biggest weekend in almost a year, with the celebration of the new lunar year, Valentine’s Day and the crowd at the Australian Open.
Melbourne experienced a 111-day exclusion last year, one of the strictest and longest in the world at the time, causing an outbreak of the coronavirus that led to more than 800 deaths.
“It’s the busiest weekend of the year for us. I’m sitting here making 178 heartbreaking calls to see if I can get it booked, ”said Will Baa, owner of Lover, a restaurant in the hip district of Windsor.
‘It’s quite soul-destroying. But we are resilient. “Only fingers crossed that it only extends over the short period of five days,” he said.
The Australian Open continues on Saturday without the audience following the new final order [Loren Elliott/Reuters]
More generally, Australia is considered the world’s most successful country in tackling the pandemic, mainly due to decisive closures and borders sealed to all but a drop of travelers. With a population of 25 million, there were approximately 22,200 community cases and 909 deaths.
New Zealand also reported the death of a patient with COVID-19 on Saturday.
The person was taken to hospital out of quarantine due to an unrelated condition and later tested positive. The case is yet to be included in the country’s total of 25 COVID-19 deaths.