Australian police dispatched to ensure 3,000 residents stay inside apartments under COVID quarantine

Thousands of residents of several public housing units in Melbourne will be forcibly confined to their apartments by local police as part of a drastic coronavirus quarantine described by the state's premier as a "hard lockdown."

The orders were reportedly implemented without warning on Saturday afternoon. Five hundred police are standing watch to ensure the lockdown is followed for possibly the next fourteen days. 

A total of 3,000 residents will be forbidden from leaving their apartments for any reason over the course of the lockdown. The Victoria Minister for Housing Richard Wynne said the strict quarantine was implemented because the tower's residents are "some of the most vulnerable people in our community."

"Many of them are subject to co-morbidities," Wynne said on Saturday, "and we want to ensure that we wrap around them all of the services that they are going to need, not just over the next five days or indeed potentially the next 14 days, but going forward that we provide them with all of the support they need to maintain their tenancy but obviously to maintain their wellness also."

Australian Acting Chief Medical Officer Paul Kelly, meanwhile, said that allowing the towers' residents to come and go as they please would "pose an unacceptable risk to the health and wellbeing of those who live in the towers and, by extension, the health and wellbeing of every single Victorian."

Residents will have food and other necessities delivered to them by government officials during the lockdown.

The data tracking website Worldometers estimates that Australia currently has a total of 853 active coronavirus cases.