South Australia state going into 6-day lockdown for authorities to boost contact tracing

"As of midnight tonight [13:30, Wednesday GMT], we need our community to pause for six days. A series of wide-ranging restrictions will be implemented to significantly reduce mobility in the community to stop the spread, to stamp out this virus," Marshall said at a press conference.

As outlined by South Australian Police Commissioner Grant Stevens at the same press conference, closures will affect everything but essential and critical services.

Schools, food services, including take-away orders, entertainment venues and construction sites will be shut. Outdoor sports, as well as wedding and funeral ceremonies will be prohibited. Masks will be mandatory everywhere outside the home. One person per one household will be allowed to go outside for grocery shopping per day.

The facilities that will continue working include supermarkets, medical facilities, including those for mental health services, public transport, airports, petrol stations, and postal and financial institutions. Some large mining facilities and factories will also be let remain open under certain conditions, including situations where the closure would result in the facility's damage. Child care will remain available only to families of essential workers.

As stated by South Australian Chief Public Health Officer Nicola Spurrier, the new restrictions are needed to ensure that authorities conduct contact tracing promptly enough to prevent the virus from spreading. Australian health authorities use the concept of "generations" to describe the pace of the virus' transmission, with every generation level indicating how many handshakes away is the infected individual from the initial infector.

"At the moment in South Australia, we have done all the contact tracing up to the fourth generation, but the fifth generation is out there in our community, and at the moment we are contact tracing to get on to that fifth generation," Spurrier explained as being the reason of "going into this six-day period of really significant restrictions."

According to the health official, the virus has an extremely short incubation period of less than 24 hours and with infected people often showing no or minimal symptoms, hence the urgency of the lockdown.

As of Wednesday, Australia's total cumulative coronavirus toll is 27,756 cases and 907 deaths, of which South Australia accounts for 545 cases and four deaths.