How a casual cleaner’s unremarkable activities sparked a national health emergency

A

series of unremarkable activities – a train ride from the suburbs to the city, two visits to the supermarket, a brief stop at the newsagency – triggered a national health emergency with a casual cleaner at its centre.

How the cleaner, a woman in her 20s who works at a Brisbane CBD quarantine hotel and lives in the southern suburb of Algester, caught the highly contagious UK variant of COVID-19 remains under investigation.

But confirmation she had that strain put all Australian governments on high alert last week and triggered a snap three-day lockdown for more than 2.3 million south-eastern Queenslanders, which ended at 6pm Monday.