Australia has introduced another stringent border measure to stop the spread of COVID-19, with Queensland announcing it is closing its doors to Greater Sydney.
It comes as New South Wales (NSW) health officials confirmed 19 new cases in the state, with most linked to clusters in Sydney including the funeral cluster, the Thai Rock Wetherill Park cluster and the Potts Point outbreak, the Sydney Morning Herald reports.
Anyone who has been in Greater Sydney in the previous 14 days prior to their arrival in Queensland will be turned away. Queensland residents need to pay for their own mandatory hotel isolation.
Queensland Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk announced the new restrictions on Wednesday after two teenagers - who returned to the state from Melbourne via Sydney - became the first people with COVID-19 to be in the community since May. These were the only two cases announced in Queensland on Wednesday.
Palaszczuk confirmed the regulations on Twitter, which means people in Greater Sydney join Victoria residents in being banned from entering Queensland.
"Queensland will close its borders to all of Greater Sydney. From 1am Saturday, more hotspots will be declared and no one from Sydney will be allowed into Queensland," she said.
NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian said she wasn't given a warning about the border restrictions.
"It would have been nice if [Palaszczuk] told me, but that's fine," she said, according to 9 News.
"I note that the cases they have had up there announced today are all from Victoria… In the end it hurts the smaller states when they don't interact with New South Wales."
The two 19-year-old women who were reported as the new Queensland cases gave health authorities "misleading information", Palaszczuk said.
"Because of the negligent actions of these two we now have to do a lot of contact tracing and it's going to be an inconvenience to a lot of people."
Queensland chief health officer Dr Jeannette Young said the pair hadn't been self-isolating and were travelling through southern Brisbane communities for eight days while infectious.
The two women live in separate homes in Brisbane, and one of them is a cleaner at a local school, 9 News reported.
