A Pizza Worker’s Lie Forced An Australian State Of 1.7 Million People Into Lockdown

A pizza bar worker who had COVID-19 and lied about their employment activities triggered a lockdown across the entire state of South Australia.

According to CNN, South Australia Premier Steven Marshall told reporters that 1.7 million people would not have gone into the six-day “circuit breaker” if the employee had been honest with a contact-tracing team. Marshall announced the state had decided to lift its six-day lockdown early, based on the new information.

The employee lied by claiming to have been at the Woodville Pizza Bar in the city of Adelaide only briefly to collect a takeaway pizza but had actually been working regular shifts there.

Because of that lie, authorities had concluded that the strain of COVID-19 was “highly contagious,” assuming the employee had caught it despite a very short period of exposure.

South Australia went into lockdown on Wednesday after confirming dozens of locally transmitted cases for the first time since April. Authorities determined the pizza bar was a COVID-19 hotspot.

“SA health contact tracers found that one of the close contacts linked to the Woodville Pizza Bar deliberately mislead the contact tracing team,” Marshall said. “We now know that they lied.”

The state’s stay-at-home order was repealed Saturday at midnight, and South Australians will be permitted to exercise outdoors and go back to previous restrictions.

The employee who lied will not be fined or penalized.