Covid: Melbourne lockdown to end after quarantine outbreak controlled - BBC News

The Australian state of Victoria and the New Zealand city of Auckland will both exit snap lockdowns on Thursday.

Authorities in Australia said they had gained control of a hotel quarantine cluster in Melbourne, which prompted a five-day lockdown.

The state of Victoria recently saw a cluster of 19 cases emerge after a person working at a Melbourne hotel housing quarantined cases unknowingly caught the UK variant of the virus and carried it into the community.

But the state government is now under pressure to explain how the virus escaped hotel quarantine, after similar breaches nationally in recent times.

He did not say whether spectators would be allowed to return to the Australian Open tennis tournament in Melbourne for the finals week.

Prior to the outbreak, Victoria - Australia's second most populous state - had not seen a local infection for 28 days.

The state had already endured two previous lockdowns - including a four-month shutdown of its state capital Melbourne - due to failures in the hotel quarantine scheme.

But some experts - including the Australian Medical Association - have been calling for a review of hotel quarantine environments due to concerns about airborne transmission.

On Thursday, Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern announced that the lockdown would end as planned at midnight, even though three more locally transmitted cases have since been discovered.

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