Brisbane and Moreton Bay will remain locked down for another 24 hours

Townsville and all of southeast Queensland, except for Brisbane and Moreton Bay, will be released from lockdown as authorities seven COVID-19 outbreaks.

Brisbane and Moreton Bay will remain locked down for another 24 hours after three new locally-acquired cases of COVID-19 were recorded in the region.

Southeast Queensland and Townsville have been in lockdown for three days to help authorities trace and contain seven separate virus clusters.

The state government is confident all but one outbreak in Brisbane is under control, so lockdown will end in Noosa, Sunshine Coast, Ipswich, Logan, Redlands, Gold Coast, the Scenic Rim, Lockyer Valley, Somerset and Townsville at 6pm on Friday.

Residents of those areas will still have to wear face masks outside of their homes, unless they’re exercising, for the next two weeks.

Brisbane and Moreton Bay will remain in lockdown for 24 hours due to concern about two of three new local cases recorded on Friday.

The cases of a mother and daughter from Carindale are unlinked to other clusters and Premier Annastacia Palaszcuzk says time is needed to trace their movements.

“Now we will come back early tomorrow morning, once your contact tracers get on top of this, and we’ll look at the case numbers overnight,” Ms Palaszczuk said.

“So I want to thank everyone for doing the right thing, but as you can see we’ve just got a situation at the moment, that has just come in, and we really need to give our people, our contact tracers the time to do that.”

Chief Health Officer Jeannette Young was confident it was safe to lift lockdown outside Brisbane due to the low cases numbers after 26,993 tests in the last 24 hours.

“I can be reasonably comfortable that we are unlikely to have a significant chain of transmission going on,” she said.

Another new local case is linked to Qatar Airways check-in desk staffer who was announced as a case on Thursday, but authorities are not concerned about it.

The state is dealing with another four separate outbreaks, believed be the Delta strain of COVID-19, in two miners who arrived from the NT, a Virgin crew member and a Brisbane hospital worker.

A case in the Alpha variant outbreak at a Brisbane Portuguese club has also been admitted to ICU overnight, but they’re not on a ventilator.

Deputy Premier Steven Miles has also repeated a call for quarantine caps to be cut warning the state’s system will hit capacity on Friday.

He said there there 285 rooms left with 259 international arrivals and an unknown number of domestic arrivals due.

“It will take seven days for our police and hotel quarantine coordinators to get a new hotel up and running and so it’s absolutely critical that we see that cut in the number of international visitors,” Mr Miles said.

Meanwhile, Ms Palaszczuk said every eligible Australian should be offered a vaccine of their choice before the international borders are reopened.

“You think about it, if for example members of your family had not had that offer of the vaccine, and the virus came in, and they ended up on ventilator, you wouldn’t forgive yourself,” she said.

“So I think every eligible Australian should have the opportunity to have been offered a vaccine and then I think we then need to look at (that).”