Police bust two people breaking quarantine


Police bust two people breaking quarantine

Two people have been caught breaching home quarantine in Queensland in as many days as the state announces it will close its border to greater Sydney tomorrow night.

Queensland’s Deputy Commissioner Steve Gollschewski confirmed a person from the northern beaches and a member of an international flight crew were found not following instructions to quarantine in the last two days.

“They were found to have breached those orders by compliance checks by police,” he told reporters.

“We are checking, so anyone who does go to home quarantine, (they) can expect to get visited during the 14 days.”

Since 4pm on Friday Queensland Police have checked more than 10,000 passengers on 87 flights from Sydney.

108 people have been ordered to quarantine as a result.

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International airline crew have previously been exempt from mandatory 14-day quarantine and were instead able to manage their own self-isolation in their home or a hotel room.

Last week NSW announced it would be changing this exemption to allow airline staff to quarantine at two selected hotels only that would be guarded by police.

NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian last week confirmed airline staff left quarantine to visit several Sydney venues in a breach of rules “a few weeks ago”.

Queensland authorities today also flagged that they would be making changes to the current exemption for airline crew.

The decision to make airline crew exempt from mandatory quarantine has previously been criticised by experts as a “risk” that “doesn’t make sense”.

Queensland Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk announced this afternoon that Sydney residents would no longer be allowed into the state from Monday night, while Queenslanders currently in NSW will be given until 1am on Tuesday to get home.

NSW today recorded 30 new coronavirus cases in the past 24 hours, with 28 of them linked to the Avalon coronavirus cluster. The other two under investigation are northern beaches residents.

Anyone who has been in the northern beaches region on or since December 11 and are already in Queensland are required to get tested and quarantine at home or in accommodation until 14 days after the date they left.

Until the border closure comes into effect, anyone from the NSW Central Coast or Greater Sydney area has to get tested upon arrival in Queensland and isolate until they receive a negative result.

The Queensland breaches come as NSW authorities continue to scramble to find patient zero at the centre of the Avalon cluster.

NSW Health Minister Brad Hazzard said the government is still “not confident” they know where the case came from.

“The only missing link here at the moment is who was the original source of that overseas virus,” he said at a press conference today.

“We have spoken about this before, there was one passenger who came in on December 1 and because of the incredible capacity of our pathology and tracing teams we know that the genomic sequencing has indicated that that person had a genomic sequence very close to the cases that were occurring in Avalon. But we don’t know how we got there, that is the issue.”

NSW chief health officer Dr Kerry Chant said there was “no one else” who had been identified who could be the source of the outbreak, according to genomic sequencing.

“At the moment we are forensically looking at all of the journeys of that individual to see if there were any points associated with it.”


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