State to enter its sixth lockdown at 8pm

VICTORIA will enter a seven-day lockdown in an effort to contain a growing outbreak of the COVID-19 Delta variant in Melbourne’s western suburbs.

Premier Daniel Andrews confirmed the lockdown will begin at 8pm on Thursday, after the state recorded eight new COVID-19 cases.

The same rules that applied during last month’s lockdown will be reimposed, including the five-kilometre travel limit for exercise and shopping and compulsory masks indoors and outdoors.

“There is no alternative for us but to listen to our public health experts, take their advice, and make the decision, the very difficult decision, my cabinet colleagues and I have made on the advice, and that is Victoria will have a lockdown again for seven days,” Mr Andrews said.

Victorians have been given less than four hours notice of the lockdown, unlike previous ones that started at midnight, because a previous outbreak was linked to a dinner on lockdown-eve, Mr Andrews said.

The sixth lockdown was prompted in part by fears a teacher at Al-Taqwa College in Truganina infected with COVID-19 may have unknowingly spread the virus while infectious.

She also passed the virus on to her partner and his parents. It is unknown how the couple, who live in the Hobsons Bay area and are both in their 20s, caught the virus.

Authorities are racing to trace the source of their infection and that of a man in his 20s who lives in the Maribyrnong council.

He works at a warehouse in Derrimut and he and his housemate are now isolating.

The three other cases from Thursday’s numbers are linked to the Moonee Valley testing site cluster.

It is the sixth lockdown for Victoria since the start of the pandemic and the fourth in 2021.

The state’s fifth lockdown ended just nine days ago. Mr Andrews said even though all the cases announced on Thursday are in Melbourne, sewage tests had detected virus fragments in the Wangaratta region.

“As painful as it is, and counterintuitive sometimes as it is, we don’t want this taking hold in country Victoria,” he said.

It is the sixth lockdown for Victoria since the start of the pandemic and the fourth in 2021.

The state’s fifth lockdown ended just nine days ago.

-BY AAP