COVID border chaos
VICTORIA has slammed its border shut to Perth residents after a passenger infected with coronavirus landed at Melbourne airport.
The man caught the virus at a quarantine hotel in Perth after being in China and then flew to Melbourne without knowing he was a carrier.
On Friday night, the case plunged Perth into a three-day lockdown after it was revealed the man had moved around the city for four days.
The Victorian government responded by declaring Perth and the nearby Peel area as red zones, and contact tracers scrambled to track and test all 257 passengers on the man’s flight.
It is Victoria’s first community case of COVID-19 in eight weeks.
All passengers on the April 21 flight QF778 have been ordered to get tested and isolate for 14 days.
Anyone who was at Melbourne Airport’s terminal one from 6.30pm-7.30pm on April 21 has also been ordered to get tested and isolate until they get a negative result.
The returned traveller, a father of two in his 50s, travelled to Melbourne after returning from Shanghai and completing two weeks’ hotel quarantine in Perth.
WA authorities alerted the man that he had been identified as a close contact upon touching down in Melbourne.
The man is understood to have worn a mask at Melbourne Airport and was picked up by his spouse and taken directly to his eastern suburbs home. He did not leave home except for a COVID-19 test because he felt unwell.
He returned a positive test at 2am on Friday after he had already transferred to the Holiday Inn Flinders health hotel at his own request.
His spouse, children and a friend of one child have been identified as close contacts.
They were told to immediately get tested and quarantine for a full 14 days. The results of their tests are not known.
As he sent Perth into lockdown, WA Premier Mark McGowan said the Melbourne man completed quarantine in an “adjacent” room of a positive case on the sixth floor of the Mercure Hotel in Perth. He was in a room alongside an infectious family from the UK and opposite an infectious couple from India.
The man returned a negative result on day 12 of hotel quarantine and was released on April 17.
The outbreak comes as Victoria flags banning arrivals from India amid a COVID emergency on the subcontinent.
Prime Minister Scott Morrison slashed the number of arrivals from India by a third and banned travel there except in “very urgent circumstances”.
India recorded 314,835 cases on Thursday, the worst singleday case increase in any country since the pandemic began.
State Health Minister Martin Foley said Victoria may impose stricter measures with people from India, Bangladesh and Pakistan “disproportionately over-represented” in Victoria’s quarantine program.