“It’s about wearing a mask, it’s about doing the right thing, it’s about ensuring you follow all the rules and precautions we are putting in place,” he said.
He said the new level of restrictions will remain in place for the next week.
Mr McGowan defended his decision last week to send Perth and Peel into a snap three-day lockdown, saying it remained preferable to months of lower-grade restrictions.
“Lockdowns are a method that does help prevent the spread of the virus very quickly, and it gets the matter over with as quickly as we possibly can,” he said.
“The Western Australia model has been we try and prevent the virus from coming in, with borders. If we have any spread of the virus we try and kill it quickly. That’s a far better model than allowing the virus to linger in the community.”
He claimed that Western Australia had done “better than any other state in Australia” at keeping the virus out and he would continue to pursue that strategy.
He pointed to the outbreak on Sydney’s Northern Beaches as an example of an outbreak where extended measures restricted residents’ movement and cost the economy.
“They had three months – three months – of measures put in place. It cost the NSW economy $3.2 billion,” he said.
“I’d rather kill the virus quickly over the course of a long weekend than three months of restrictions.”
“This is a very pleasing result,” Mr McGowan said.
There was one new case, a man in his 30s, inside the state’s hotel quarantine program detected overnight.
There have been more than 53,000 coronavirus tests conducted across Western Australia since last Friday in what Mr McGowan called “a great result”.
“People have taken it seriously,” he said.
However, he urged people with symptoms to continue to come forward, noting that WA was still in the incubation period since the latest outbreak, sparked by an infectious Victorian man who spent five days travelling around Perth and Peel.
Western Australia has halved the number of returned overseas travellers coming into the state this month as it grapples with its latest outbreak, but Mr McGowan has flagged a more permanent reduction.
Declining to reveal his discussions with the Prime Minister at National Cabinet on the quarantine situation, he said “clearly the Commonwealth knows our position”.
“I wrote to the Prime Minister during the course of this week – in fact, twice – about these matters,” he said.
It comes after the premier accused the federal government of shirking its responsibility for quarantining returned travellers and handing responsibility over to the states.
Mr McGowan confirmed that WA will be removing three of its quarantine hotels from operation, one of which will be converted to house seasonal workers brought in from Tonga and Vanuata.
“That will mean we reduce the number of returning travellers to Western Australia significantly,” he said.
“Where we land and what our exact number we can take that we willadvise the Commonwealth of, we will do in the course of coming days, once we work out exactly what we can safely manage.”
This content first appear on 9news