Victorian premier Daniel Andrews has announced a snap five-day lockdown in response to an outbreak at the Holiday Inn.
The measures will begin at 11.59pm Friday night and will impact the entire state.
Mr Andrews said the restrictions were vital to contain the “fastest-moving most infectious strain of coronavirus that we have seen” – referring to the UK strain which is at the centre of the current outbreak.
The premier said he was confident the “short, sharp” circuit breaker would be effective to “smother” the virus.
The Melbourne Airport quarantine hotel cluster rose to 13, with two extra cases overnight and an airport cafe added to the list of exposure sites.
The restrictions include mandatory masks, no visitors to the home, no public gatherings and schools closing.
Earlier
“We believe there will be some additional exposure sites emerging from some of these cases,” Victoria’s COVID-19 testing boss Jeroen Weimar told reporters.
“That work needs to be done over the coming hours.”
All three new cases were already in isolation as part of a pool of 400-500 primary close contacts.
Mr Weimar said authorities were “right on top” of the outbreak, picking up cases among identified contacts who had tested negative just days earlier.
His “working assumption” is the entire cluster has been infected with the more transmissible UK variant of COVID-19, complicating the containment job for officials.
“This is by no means over,” Mr Weimar said.
“We are still in the opening quarter of the Holiday Inn outbreak, I’m afraid. We’ve got a lot more work to do.”
The emerging cluster has prompted several states to tighten their borders to travellers from Greater Melbourne.
South Australia locked out travellers from the Victorian capital at midnight on Thursday, while Queensland will bar entry to visitors of the city’s exposure sites from 1am on Saturday.
Western Australia also announced its hard border to Victoria would be extended for at least another seven days.
In addition to strengthened interstate borders, the outbreak has forced the hotel’s closure, a pause on a planned increase to Victoria’s weekly international travellers cap and multiple health alerts for potential exposure sites.
An undeclared nebuliser, used inside the room of an infected family of three, is the suspected cause of the outbreak.
