Australia locks down again as coronavirus cases surge
Australian authorities were battling to contain multiple coronavirus outbreaks on Wednesday, with half the nation’s population and four big cities under lockdown.
New South Wales, the state worst hit by the latest outbreak, reported 22 new locally transmitted cases.
Kerry Chant, the state’s chief health officer, said the new infections were linked to four venues where transmission had been identified: two pubs, a pizzeria and a shopping centre.
The latest surge will pile greater pressure on the government for its sluggish vaccination drive. After winning international praise for its initial response in reining in the virus, health experts had warned that a slow rollout would jeopardise those early gains.
On Wednesday, Nigel McMillan, professor of medical science at Griffith University in Queensland’s Gold Coast, said that new strains of the virus were taking advantage of Australia’s low vaccination rate.
While about 30 per cent of the 26m population have received at least a first jab, only about 7 per cent of Australians are fully vaccinated.
McMillan added that “the virus has upped its game” with the Delta variant. He said that the strain first detected in India was up to four times as transmissible as the original Sars-Cov-2 virus and twice as transmissible as the Alpha variant first identified in the UK.
He added that Australia’s hotel quarantine system had begun to “leak a little”, with cases escaping into the community through unvaccinated hotel staff, drivers and air crew.
Sydney, the New South Wales capital and the country’s largest city, has been placed under a two-week lockdown until July 9 to combat the outbreak, while Perth, Brisbane and Darwin are locked down until Friday night.
“Hopefully these lockdowns will be relatively short, and enable contact tracers and public health officials in these jurisdictions to get on top of what are potentially serious outbreaks of the coronavirus,” said Paul Kelly, the country’s chief medical officer.
“I know these lockdowns are incredibly disruptive, but implementing them really is the right thing to do.”
The latest New South Wales numbers were lower than the high of 30 new cases reported on Sunday, but state officials remained concerned. Gladys Berejiklian, premier, said the state was “demonstrating a steady rate of cases” but that “fears about a huge escalation haven’t materialised”.
Western Australia has halted arrivals from Queensland, while Victoria, the state most affected by the pandemic with 90 per cent of total deaths and two-thirds of total cases in the country, closed its borders to people from south-east Queensland and Perth. Victoria recorded one new locally transmitted case on Wednesday.
Martin Foley, Victoria’s health minister, said Australia was in a precarious position. “It is clear that as a nation, things are extremely delicately poised at the moment,” he said.