PARTS OF MELBOURNE GO INTO LOCKDOWN

More than 30 neighbourhoods to be locked down until July 29

HUNDREDS of thousands of people across north and west parts of the city here were ordered to stay at home yesterday as Australia’s secondbiggest city struggled to contain a spike in Covid-19 cases.

Victoria state had recorded 233 cases since Thursday — mostly here — a major surge in a country that had otherwise successfully curbed the spread of the virus.

State premier Daniel Andrews said more than 30 neighbourhoods here would be subject to the lockdown from midnight today until July 29.

The areas covered were home to more than 300,000 people, in the city of roughly five million.

Residents would be allowed to leave their homes only for work or school, to exercise, or to buy food and other essential items.

People from other areas would be prevented from entering the worst-affected communities, with police on patrol and officers stopping cars to conduct random checks.

Many businesses would have to close down just weeks after reopening.

“These are extraordinary steps,” Andrews said. “But such is the nature of this virus, it is so wildly infectious that if we don’t take these steps now we will finish up in a situation that rather than locking down 10 postcodes we will be locking down every postcode.

“I don’t want to get to that point.”

Andrews said he had asked Prime Minister Scott Morrison to divert international flights bound for the city here to other cities in Australia.

Genomic sequencing showed that a “significant number” of the new cases were linked to staff breaching infection-control protocols in hotels that were being used to quarantine Australians returning from overseas, Andrews added.

Hundreds of health workers and military personnel had been drafted to assist with the efforts to curb the virus.

Officials had been door-knocking in the worst-affected communities, urging residents to get tested for Covid-19.

Australia had recorded about 7,800 cases and 104 deaths in a population of 25 million.

Several Australian regions were believed to be effectively virusfree, allowing states to continue rolling back restrictions first introduced in late March.

Victoria, which had curbed the virus through early restrictions on travel and gatherings, had been easing rules until the flareup last week.