West Australia Premier Mark McGowan heeded calls from the Australia Medical Association and plunged Perth into a minimum four-day lockdown after two new COVID-19 cases in the city’s northern suburbs.
Both of the cases are linked to a physiotherapist who returned to Perth from Sydney last week carrying the highly infectious delta variant.
The physiotherapist spent three days in the community before she became ill and went into isolation.
The cases uncovered on Monday involve a woman in her 30s, who had fleeting contact with the physiotherapist at a gym, and a man in his 30s, who dined at the same tavern as the physiotherapist – the Indian Ocean brewery in Mindarie – last Tuesday.
He said the transfer of hundreds of workers from that mine back into the community had complicated contact tracing in several states.
“We are asking the FIFO workforce to stay here. … We are asking those that are there [on site] to continue their swing,” he said.
Mr McGowan said the government is trying to avoid a lockdown of “three weeks or a month”.
We hope this will be a circuit-breaker which will give our testers and contact tracers time to nail down a truer picture.
— Mark McGowan, WA Premier
“Let’s imagine we wait a few more days … then our lockdown would probably go for three weeks, a month. It would be appalling. So we are trying to avoid that,” he said.
It is the third lockdown in Perth this year and comes after Mr McGowan initially resisted shutting down the city on the basis of one case as was the case on the previous two occasions.
Earlier on Monday, the Australian Medical Association in WA called for a lockdown to guard against the delta outbreak “outrunning” contact tracing.
AMA WA president Mark Duncan-Smith said the situation was more dire than with previous cases in the Perth community because it involved the delta variant.
Mr McGowan said it was a great concern that the latest cases in Perth had only the slightest contact with the physiotherapist.
“Tonight we also had genomic sequencing confirm that the original case, who had visited Sydney, is now confirmed as carrying the delta variant, the same variant from the Sydney outbreak,” he said.
“That is why, based on advice from the Chief Health Officer, effective from midnight tonight, Perth and Peel will enter a full lockdown for four days, at a minimum.
“We will continue to review the situation, based on testing numbers and information from our contact tracing team, and provide updates when we can.
“We hope this will be a circuit-breaker which will give our testers and contact tracers time to nail down a truer picture of how far this latest outbreak has spread.“
Mr McGowan said WA authorities were worried the delta variant could linger in the community and spread very easily.
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