BREAKING: Western Australia’s Perth and Peel regions will go into a three-day lockdown from midnight tonight, with restaurants, cafés and pubs to revert to takeaway services only.
Gyms, indoor sporting venues, playground and skate parks will close, as well as cinemas, entertainment venues, libraries and places of worship, and Anzac Dawn Services in Perth and Peel have been cancelled.
Masks will be mandatory from 6pm tonight.
When the lockdown comes into effect, residents will only be allowed to leave their homes for one of four reasons: for work when work cannot be done remotely, to shop for essential goods, for medical or healthcare reasons (including looking after the vulnerable), and for exercise with a maximum of four people, limited to one hour a day.
The snap lockdown comes ahead of the state’s long weekend holiday, as authorities try to contain a COVID-19 outbreak at Perth’s Mercure Hotel.
Returned travellers staying at the quarantine hotel have contracted COVID-19 from an infected couple staying on the same floor.
The cases include a Victorian man who travelled from Perth to Melbourne after his 14-day quarantine at the hotel, and a pregnant woman and her four-old-daughter who tested positive on their twelfth day of quarantine.
The lockdown is set to lift at midnight at 11.59pm on Monday 26 April.
