The third city in Australia, Brisbane, lifts the confinement decreed this Monday after the discovery of a first case of the British variant of covid-19, without any new case of coronavirus having been registered.
Since Friday night, more than two million inhabitants of Greater Brisbane have been confined by decision of the authorities.
The move was taken after a worker at a hotel hosting quarantined people contracted the highly infectious variant of COVID-19 discovered in the UK.
The Prime Minister of the state of Queensland in Australia, Annastacia Palaszczuk, declared that the lockdown will be lifted on Monday at 18:00 (08:00 GMT).
Tens of thousands of tests have been carried out and no cases of virus transmission have been detected in the city.
“We wanted to make sure we act quickly, we have acted firmly, decisively,” he explained, saying that the lockdown “was not an overreaction.”
The use of the mask will remain mandatory until January 22 indoors and on public transport, while restaurants and bars will be subject to new restrictions on the number of customers.
In mid-December, the British informed the WHO of the existence of this variant more contagious than the covid-19 strains previously detected in Australia. The first case of contagion by the British variant in Australia led the authorities to reduce the number of arrivals from abroad.
Australia has registered more than 28,600 cases of covid-19 and 909 deaths, for a population of about 25 million inhabitants.
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