Bungling sends Melbourne into a snap lockdown
People queue at a vaccination center in Melbourne on Thursday after 5 million residents were ordered into a snap weeklong lockdown following another COVID-19 outbreak.
More than 5 million people in Australia's second-biggest city of Melbourne were ordered into a snap weeklong lockdown yesterday, as officials blamed a sluggish vaccine rollout and hotel quarantine failures for another COVID-19 outbreak.
Stay-at-home orders will apply to Melbourne and surrounding Victoria state from midnight for seven days, acting state Premier James Merlino told residents, as the cluster doubled to 26 cases.
"In the last day, we've seen more evidence we're dealing with a highly infectious strain of the virus, a variant of concern, which is running faster than we have ever recorded," Merlino said.
The variant detected is known as B1617, which has spread widely in India, and is believed to have been transmitted from a traveler who returned to Australia from overseas.
Schools, pubs and restaurants are set to close, while gatherings will be banned and mask-wearing made mandatory.
The neighboring country New Zealand has already suspended its travel bubble with Victoria and residents are now being shut out of other Australian states, prompting major airlines to slash Melbourne services.
The "circuit-breaker" lockdown is designed to allow contact tracers to get on top of cases, with residents permitted to leave home only for essential reasons including getting vaccinated.
Merlino said the conservative federal government's sluggish vaccine rollout was partly to blame for the lockdown, saying it was "not where it should be."
"If more people were vaccinated, we might be facing a very different set of circumstances than we are today. But sadly we are not," he said.
It is the fourth time Australia's second-biggest city has been plunged into lockdown since the pandemic began, including nearly four months of harsh restrictions last year.
Thousands of people across Melbourne were already self-isolating after infected people attended dozens of locations including two Aussie Rules football matches, several nightclubs and a medieval battle reenactment.
