SA border closed to all of Victoria as hotel COVID cluster grows

SA will shut its border to all of Victoria from midnight amid a growing COVID outbreak there. Anyone who flew in from Tullamarine Airport must get tested immediately and quarantine.

SA will extend its border closure to all people travelling from Victoria from midnight as that state is plunged into a five-day lockdown in an attempt to stop a third COVID-19 wave.

Anyone in SA who was in Terminal 4 at Tullamarine Airport since February 9 must immediately get tested and go into 14-day quarantine.

SA Health is trying to contact about 500 people who have travelled through Terminal 4 during this time. Their family and close contacts will also need to get a test and isolate for 14 days.

Anyone who was been at Tullamarine Airport generally since February 7 – including airline staff – need to get tested immediately and quarantine until their first negative COVID test. This rule includes their family and household members.

People who travelled through Tullamarine do not need to quarantine for the full 14 days as the risk is lower, SA chief public health officer Nicola Spurrier said.

The hard border closure for all Victorians includes cross-border communities, Police Commissioner Grant Stevens said, because they will need to follow Victoria’s five-day lockdown.

People who cross the border for essential activities – such as shopping – will be allowed to do that but police will be at border checkpoints.

“We are deploying additional police officers to the primary check points,” he said.

“We will maintain that until we see the expected drop off of activity once the full lockdown takes effect.”

Testing arrangements for NSW and WA will be lifted from midnight tonight, a day earlier.

Victoria will start the lockdown from midnight tonight after a worker at a Melbourne Airport cafe tested positive to COVID-19, leading to the site being added to a growing list of Melbourne exposure sites.

Five new cases linked to the Melbourne Airport Holiday Inn quarantine medi-hotel were recorded in the past 24 hours.

SA recorded no new cases today, with about 6600 tests conducted on Thursday.

Professor Spurrier expressed concern the strain in the Holiday Inn outbreak was the UK variant, which is highly transmissible.

“Obviously things are progressing quite rapidly in Victoria,” she said. “We’re seeing an increasing number (of cases) … these are people that work at Tullamarine Airport, they are not related to each other. They are close contacts of cases at the Holiday Inn.”

Prof Spurrier said she was most concerned about the case in Terminal 4, from where Jetstar and Rex airlines leave.

The Brunelli cafe worker there who tested positive had worked an eight-hour shift while infectious and despite mandatory requirements for masks in airports, “obviously if you’re going to be drinking coffee, you’re going to have your mask off”, she said.

“It’s considered really quite risky that we’ve had that exposure in that cafe … all the states are taking this quite seriously,” she said.

The cafe worker was a close contact of a previously confirmed case of a Holiday Inn quarantine worker.

The airport was today listed as a Tier 1 site in terms of exposure possibility, raising fears the outbreak could spread interstate.

Melbourne Airport Terminal 4 hosts local and domestic budget flights, featuring Jetstar and Tigerair domestic carriers.

Prof Spurrier said it was vital for household members to quarantine while travellers waited for their 14-day isolation to end or a negative result

“In Victoria, by the time they are getting a test from a primary contact, and quarantining that secondary contact, that second contact is already testing positive,” she said.

Premier Steven Marshall said the precautions were in place to help protect our upcoming festival season.

“This is a very important protection so that we can still enjoy Fringe, we can still enjoy Festival, we can still enjoy WOMAD,” he said.

Prof Spurrier said there were no restriction on numbers at the Fringe at this point and SA Health would work with artists not yet in SA on a “case-by-case basis”.

“We don’t feel there is a risk from a community transmission in our own state, of course if we get a positive in our state, that will change things considerably,” she said.

On Thursday, Mr Stevens ordered a major inquiry into border checkpoint operations after a truck driver died in a fiery crash witnesses described as a “bottleneck disaster waiting to happen”.

He revealed five officers were stationed at the Victorian border, where hundreds of vehicles and trucks lined up to enter SA on Wednesday hours after a snap closure announcement.