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METERMillions of people in Melbourne and the rest of the Australian state of Victoria have to go through a severe lockdown due to five new infections. Because Dan Andrews, Prime Minister of Victoria, does not want to risk anything. A second wave of Covid “got away” from the politician in July and ultimately resulted in a lockdown that lasted more than a hundred days.
“In the last 24 hours, five cases of coronavirus have been reported to the Ministry of Health,” Andrews said at a news conference on Friday afternoon (local time). This means that a group that broke out in a quarantined hotel at the airport has grown to 19 active cases.
This is explosive: on the one hand, the hotel is at the airport and an infected person was in a cafe in the terminal, on the other hand, the outbreak is the mutation of the highly contagious British virus. He doesn’t want to wait for the problem to grow, said Martin Foley, Victoria’s health minister. “We want to be one step ahead and crush it.” To do this, it relies on the support of all citizens.
As was the case during Melbourne’s harsh, nearly four-month lockdown from July to October, people can only leave their home for essential activities or outdoor sports for the next five days.
Everyone should not go more than five kilometers from home. Private visits are temporarily banned and the mask requirement has returned. The Australian Open should continue, but without spectators. There are currently no international flights to Melbourne.
Only stores such as supermarkets, pharmacies and gas stations will be open for the next five days, restaurants and cafes will be able to sell away from home. According to Jennifer Westacott, Executive Director of the Business Council of Australia, the five-day curfew will imply “huge social and economic costs.”
Florists are shocked
Especially the florist owners who had increased their offer on Sunday because of Valentine’s Day are completely frustrated. “We are in a state of shock and we can hardly believe it,” florist Michael Pavlou said in an interview with Australian broadcaster ABC. “The timing couldn’t be worse.” Everyone would have put in so much effort and the merchandise would go bad. “It could be devastating for many small businesses in Victoria.”
Prime Minister Andrews emphasized that you have to react so quickly because the British variant is highly contagious and therefore spreads extremely fast. “This is a very real challenge to the status, the security, the open field and all the precious things that we have built over the course of 2020.”
But despite strict isolation rules for travelers and returnees, employees of quarantined Australian hotels have been re-infected. As a result, a three-day curfew had to be imposed in Brisbane last month. A similar incident triggered a brief lockdown in Perth in early February.
In recent weeks, a central quarantine station, as it used to be for newcomers to Australia, has been repeatedly debated to keep diseases like measles, typhus and smallpox out of the country.
“Victoria probably wouldn’t go into this kind of lockdown if there were special national quarantine facilities,” Queensland Deputy Prime Minister Steven Miles said on Friday.
The fact that Australia has already responded to some cases with such drastic measures has made the fight against the pandemic a success. So far, the country has had nearly 29,000 infections and just over 900 deaths.
In addition to quickly sealing entire cities and states, the country’s strategies also include closing external borders, the aforementioned quarantine program for returnees, and sophisticated contact tracing.
In order for the authorities to be able to trace hundreds or even thousands of contacts of infected people in the shortest possible time, as is the case now in Melbourne, Australians scan a QR code everywhere, be it in the supermarket, in stores, in a taxi, by the pool or in a cafe or restaurant with your mobile phone camera.
This process then opens an app or website where you enter your name and phone number. The date and time are recorded automatically. If it later turns out that someone with a known corona infection was on the scene at the same time, health authorities can quickly report, test, and isolate people.
