Credit: Pixabay / CC0 Public Domain
Australia’s two largest cities will remain under strict COVID-19 restrictions as Melbourne on Monday extended a five-day instant closure designed to curb a virulent outbreak.
“These restrictions simply cannot end at midnight tomorrow night,” said Victorian Prime Minister Daniel Andrews, without saying how long Melbourne will last. confinement would last.
About 12 million people are locked up in Melbourne and Sydney, where a month of restrictions has failed to undo an outbreak of the Delta variant.
Australia had dodged widespread community transmission during the 18 months following the onset of the pandemic, but is now seeing more than 100 new cases a day, straining contact-finding efforts.
The most recent outbreak it began in mid-June when a foreign air crew infected a local driver in Sydney.
The virus was taken to Melbourne with a shuttle, which caused an instant closure that was due to end on Tuesday at the end, but has failed to reduce the new infections to zero.
The state of Victoria reported 13 new cases on Monday.
Andrews told tired residents who were now in their fifth closure that the measures were impacting. “We’ve come a long way, we’ve avoided thousands of cases,” he said.
In Sydney, it seems increasingly unlikely that the city will stop closing its fourth week at the end of the month as planned.
On Saturday New South Wales introduced a number of new restrictions and ordered the closure of all non-critical stores.
The state reported 98 new cases on Monday.
© 2021 AFP
Citation: Melbourne extends lockout so Australia does not stop outbreak (2021, 19 July) recovered on 19 July 2021 at https://medicalxpress.com/news/2021-07-melbourne-lockdown-australia-outbreak.html
This document is subject to copyright. Apart from any fair treatment for the purposes of private study or research, no part may be reproduced without written permission. Content is provided for informational purposes only.
