Australia's Victoria State Back Under Lockdown Amid New COVID Outbreak

Melbourne went back under lockdown on Friday, as Australian health authorities said a cluster of confirmed COVID-19 positive cases had increased to 39. 

Health officials have ordered residents to stay home for seven days to prevent the infection from spreading and buy time to investigate how the virus was transmitted from a man being quarantined at a hotel.  The outbreak has been traced to an overseas traveler who was found to be infected with an Indian variant of the coronavirus.  The acting premier of Australia's southern state of Victoria, James Merlino, told reporters in Melbourne that the new outbreak is the result of "a highly infectious strain of the virus, a variant of concern, which is running faster than we have ever recorded."