Greater Brisbane entered a hard lockdown at 6pm on Friday after a cleaner at a quarantine hotel was diagnosed with the highly contagious UK variant of COVID-19.
Residents in the council areas of Brisbane, Logan, Ipswich, Moreton Bay and Redlands are required to stay at home until 6pm on Monday except for essential work, exercise, essential shopping and to access healthcare.
Masks are also mandated for people leaving home in the Greater Brisbane area.
"It is incredibly important in this time to stop the spread of this infectious UK strain. We must act immediately, we must act strongly and we have taken those strong measures today," Queensland Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk told reporters on Friday morning.
Ahead of the deadline, massive crowds flocked to supermarkets on Friday, stripping shelves of toiletries, perishables and canned goods with lines stretching for hundreds of metres at some stores.
Police were called in to untangle traffic gridlock around major supermarkets and shopping centres.
Shoppers faced long waits of up to two hours, with social media flooded with images of bare shelves and long checkout lines.
After encouraging shoppers to "only buy what they need", supermarket giants Woolworths and Coles reintroduced storewide limits to cope with the overwhelming surge in demand.
A shopper is seen looking at the empty shelves inside the Coles Supermarket at Kedron in Brisbane on 8 January, 2021. Source: AAP
Shoppers are restricted to purchase limits of two items from a range of toilet paper, anti-bacterial products, and canned, frozen goods from Friday.
Cafes, pubs and restaurants will be open only for take-away service.
Funerals will be restricted to 20 guests and weddings restricted to 10 guests.
There is a limit of two visitors in homes and people are allowed to exercise with one other.
People can enter Greater Brisbane during the lockdown period but are bound by the same restrictions.
Prime Minister Scott Morrison, speaking after an emergency national cabinet meeting to discuss the UK and other variants of the virus now spreading around the world, said the situation in Brisbane was serious.
"We know there is only one case, but what we do know is that this new strain is some 70 per cent more transmissible than the previous strains of the virus," Mr Morrison told reporters.
"So it is a very wise decision by the Queensland government, by Premier Palaszczuk, to put in place the precautions she has over the next few days."
How have other states responded?
Tasmania responded to the news out of Queensland by declaring Greater Brisbane a high-risk area.
Any traveller arriving in Tasmania from Friday who has been in Greater Brisbane since 2 January will now need to quarantine for up to 14 days. People without "suitable premises" to quarantine in will be placed into a hotel.
In NSW, Acting Premier John Barilaro said state authorities were working with their counterparts in Queensland but his state was not considering a hard border. But he said anyone already in transit from Greater Brisbane to NSW must abide by Queensland's isolation rules, and act as if they had remained in place.
WA Premier Mark McGowan announced his state would impose a hard border with the entire state of Queensland from midnight on Friday, with travel only permitted with a police exemption.
Victoria has closed its border to travellers from Greater Brisbane as well. Anyone who has been there on or after 2 January cannot enter Victoria without an exemption.
South Australia has declared the Greater Brisbane area region a COVID-19 hotspot, with anyone arriving from midnight Friday required to go into quarantine for two weeks.
The Northern Territory government has also declared Greater Brisbane a hotspot.
Concern over case
The cleaner is Australia's first case of the more infectious variant of the coronavirus outside of quarantining returned overseas travellers.
Chief Medical Officer Paul Kelly said on Friday morning the situation in Queensland was concerning.
"We do know that we've had cases of the UK variant in our hotel quarantine system," he told ABC RN.
"And we do know sometimes with a very complex system which relies on humans, mistakes can happen. That apparently is the case here."
The hotel cleaner's infection ended almost four months of zero locally-acquired cases in Queensland.
She visited several locations while potentially infectious and contact tracers are tracking her movements.
The woman travelled on a train from Altandi station to Roma Street station at 7am on 2 January, then returned on the 4pm service the same day.
She also visited Woolworths at the Calamvale Central Shopping Centre from 11am to 12pm on Sunday 3 January.
She was at Coles in Sunnybank Hills for 30 minutes from 7.30am on Tuesday 5 January and a newsagent at Sunnybank Hills Shopping Town from 8am to 8.15am on the same day.
Residents of Algester, Sunnybank Hills and Calamvale who have symptoms of the infection are especially urged to get tested as soon as possible.
With AAP.
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