Australia coronavirus: quarantine guards spread disease, leading to Melbourne’s new lockdown

All it took was missteps in the handling of travellers returning from overseas and complacency in a handful of neighbourhoods to plunge Australia’s second-largest city into lockdown for the second time in four months.

Even as life in most of the nation returns to normal with offices, schools and bars all open, from midnight Wednesday the 5 million residents of Melbourne will be back under stay-at-home orders that were first imposed in March. The state of Victoria is responsible for the vast majority of Australia’s new Covid-19 cases in the past month, plagued by a level of community transmission previously unseen in the country.

The six-week lockdown will cause “enormous amounts of damage” to the economy and people’s welfare, state Premier Daniel Andrews conceded as he announced on Tuesday that residents will be forced to stay at home except for essential work, study, medical care or shopping.

The measures have included barring about 3,000 residents of public housing tower blocks from leaving their apartments even for food – reminiscent of the stringent controls imposed in Wuhan, the Chinese city where the virus first emerged, and making Australia one of the only western democracies to mandate that people cannot leave their homes.