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Queensland border to stay open despite new Melbourne case
By Lydia Lynch
Queensland has no plans to close its border to Victoria but has advised residents not to travel to greater Melbourne after a hotel quarantine worker in the city tested positive for COVID-19, sending hundreds of Australian Open players and staff into isolation.
Tighter restrictions have been imposed in Melbourne and up to 600 players, officials and staff at the tennis event have been quarantined after a 26-year-old quarantine worker tested positive.
Melbourne’s Grand Hyatt hotel, where a person infected with COVID-19 worked late last month while Australian Open competitors were in quarantine.Credit: Paul Jeffers
Victoria has so far avoided a full lockdown, as ordered in Perth and Brisbane after similar outbreaks in recent weeks.
While holding off introducing border restrictions with Melbourne, Queensland Chief Health Officer Jeannette Young has warned against travel to the southern city in case the situation deteriorated further.
Dr Young said as a result of the new case in Melbourne, anyone who had been in Melbourne since January 29 should come forward for testing and isolate until they get a negative result.
Aged care, disability accommodation, corrective services, prisons and hospitals have been asked not to accept visitors who have been in Greater Melbourne since January 29, except in end-of-life situations.
Queensland acting Premier Steven Miles urged residents to check the list of coronavirus exposure sites released by Victorian health authorities.
“If they have been to any of those locations at the time of concern, they will be required to quarantine for 14 days,” he said.
While Queensland added no new cases to its COVID tally overnight, there are now “three cases of interest” under investigation.
Dr Young said it was unclear whether the cases were new or historical, meaning the people could no longer be infectious.
Two people had been in hotel quarantine in Western Australia and have tested positive upon their return to Queensland – one tested positive in Townsville and the other on the Sunshine Coast.
Dr Young said the two people were most likely “persistently shedding” the virus and were no longer infectious.
The third case, a woman in north Brisbane, returned a positive test but Dr Young believes it is a “false positive”. The woman will be tested again on Thursday.
Queensland recorded its 24th consecutive day of zero locally acquired cases on Thursday and no new infections were picked up in hotel quarantine.
There were 8226 tests conducted in the past 24 hours, well above the daily target of 5000 tests.
Queensland’s pitch to quarantine returning Australians in remote parts of the country to avoid city-wide lockdowns is gaining more traction following Melbourne’s latest outbreak.
The Queensland government is pushing the national cabinet to agree to shift quarantine sites out of capital cities. The federal government is still considering the proposal.
Mr Miles said more infectious strains of the virus that have originated in Britain, Brazil and South Africa needed “greater vigilance”.
“This is the third instance recently where we have seen a case of COVID escape from quarantine hotels,” Mr Miles said.
“They are not contained to one state – we got that incident here in Queensland, the one in Perth as well as now one in Melbourne.
“This new, more infectious strand requires greater vigilance and greater protection and greater infection control.
“I understand there will be a conversation at national cabinet [on Friday] and I think it is incredibly important, underlined by these three instances in three separate states of these new, more infectious strains making their way out of hotel quarantine.”
– with Matt Dennien