Perth plunged into snap lockdown with miners told to stay home

He said the transfer of hundreds of workers from that mine back into the community had complicated contact tracing in several states.

“We are asking the FIFO workforce to stay here … we are asking those that are there [on site] to continue their swing,” he said.

Mr McGowan said the government trying to avoid a lockdown of “three weeks or a month”.

“Let’s imagine we wait a few more days … then our lockdown would probably go for three weeks, a month. It would be appalling. So we are trying to avoid that,” he said.

It is the third lockdown in Perth so far this year and comes after Mr McGowan initially resisted shutting down the city on the basis of one case as was the case on the previous two occasions.

Earlier on Monday, the Australian Medical Association in WA called for a lockdown to guard against the delta outbreak “outrunning” contact tracing.

AMA WA president Mark Duncan-Smith said the situation was more dire than with previous cases in the Perth community because it involved the delta variant.

Mr McGowan said it was a great concern that the latest cases in Perth had only the slightest contact with the physiotherapist.

“Tonight we also had genomic sequencing confirm that the original case, who had visited Sydney, is now confirmed as carrying the delta variant, the same variant from the Sydney outbreak,” he said.

“That is why, based on advice from the Chief Health Officer, effective from midnight tonight, Perth and Peel will enter a full lockdown for four days, at a minimum.

“We will continue to review the situation, based on testing numbers and information from our contact tracing team, and provide updates when we can.

“We hope this will be a circuit-breaker which will give our testers and contact tracers time to nail down a truer picture of how far this latest outbreak has spread.“

Mr McGowan said the WA authorities were worried the delta variant could linger in the community and spread very easily.

Schools and daycare centres will remain open. Weddings will be restricted to five people only and funerals can have 10 people. Restaurants will be restricted to takeaway only.

Mr McGowan said he would consider some sort of compensation packages for businesses that will be impacted.

“In terms of businesses it’s terrible. It’s absolutely heartbreaking and I’m very sorry. We will work out what compensation to put in place in the coming weeks,” he said.

Borders will be put up around the metropolitan region this evening, preventing holiday travel and other non-essential travel into regional areas.