Coronavirus: Sydney may call in more troops to enforce lockdown; expert says impossible to control Tokyo outbreak
- The move comes as Australia’s capital Canberra announced a snap one-week lockdown from Thursday evening
- A government task force expert said it was now impossible to control the spread of Covid-19 in the Japanese capital
Extra Australian military personnel may be called in to ensure compliance with lockdown rules in Sydney, the New South Wales state government said on Thursday, as the highly infectious Delta coronavirus variant spreads into regional areas.
The move comes as Australia’s capital, Canberra, 260km southwest of Sydney, announced a snap one-week lockdown from Thursday evening after reporting its first locally acquired case of Covid-19 in more than a year.
“We are making sure that we do not leave any stone unturned in relation to extra [military] resources,” NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian said at a media conference in Sydney.
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A spokesperson for Defence Minister Peter Dutton said the NSW government has indicated it would soon formally request additional military support.
Some 580 unarmed army personnel are already helping police enforce home-quarantine orders on households in the worst-affected suburbs of Sydney.
Several regional towns scattered across NSW have also been forced into snap lockdowns after fresh cases, raising fears the virus is spreading out of control.
Despite seven weeks of lockdown in Sydney, daily infections continue to hover near record highs. NSW on Thursday reported 345 new locally acquired cases, most of them in Sydney, up from 344 a day earlier.
Lockdown rules were tightened in three more local council areas in Sydney, limiting the movement of people to within 5km of their homes.
Officials also reported two deaths, two men in their 90s, taking the total deaths in the latest outbreak to 36. A total of 374 cases are in hospitals, with 62 in intensive care, 29 of whom require ventilation.
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Victoria state on Thursday reported 21 new locally acquired cases, up from 20 a day earlier, as 5 million residents of Melbourne, the state capital, prepare to enter a second week of lockdown.
Of the new cases, six spent time outdoors while infectious, a number which authorities have said must return to near zero before restrictions can be eased. Authorities on Wednesday extended the lockdown in Melbourne for another seven days until August 19.
Australia has largely avoided the high coronavirus numbers seen in many other countries, with just over 37,700 cases and 946 deaths, and several states remain almost Covid-free despite the outbreaks in Sydney and Melbourne. But the rapid spread of the Delta variant in New South Wales and a slow vaccine roll-out has left the country vulnerable to a new wave of infections. Only around 24 per cent of people above 16 years of age are fully vaccinated.
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Meanwhile, neighbouring New Zealand, which has completely stamped out the coronavirus, on Thursday announced plans to cautiously reopen its borders to international travellers early next year. Officials also said they would delay second shots of the Pfizer vaccine so they can speed up first shots to protect more people as the threat of the Delta variant grows.
“While the pandemic continues to rage overseas, and the virus continues to change and mutate, the best thing we can do is lock in the gains achieved to date while keeping our options open,” Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern said.
Indonesia’s rainy season heightens virus fears
In Aceh province, on the northwest tip of Sumatra island, floods that hit the provincial capital of Banda Aceh this week left large parts of a hospital underwater, with images on social media showing its hallways, patient wards and Covid-19 isolation rooms underwater.
Indonesia is prone to frequent natural disasters such as severe flooding, landslides, fires and earthquakes.
Indonesia fears rainy season as Covid-19 isolation wards flood
“Natural disasters such as [the flooding in Aceh] are going to make the pandemic situation worse,” said Dr Dicky Budiman, an Indonesian epidemiologist at Griffith University in Australia.
“If hospitals can’t be accessed or they can’t provide full health-care facilities for patients, it will cause the public to panic because people will not be able to access the care they need and it could end in more fatalities. Those who are already in hospital will also not be able to get the standard of care that they usually would and will need to be moved,” Budiman said.
Indonesia has also reported more than 3.7 million cases of coronavirus since the start of the pandemic and more than 112,000 deaths, although the true numbers are thought to be higher due to under-reporting.
Expert says Tokyo situation is out of control
A member of a Tokyo Metropolitan Government coronavirus advisory panel of experts said it was now impossible to control the spread of Covid-19 in the Japanese capital.
“The infection is spreading at a pace not seen before and the number of new cases is increasing rapidly,” Norio Omagari said at a Thursday panel meeting with Tokyo Governor Yuriko Koike. “It’s impossible to control the situation.”
His comments came as the city and national governments consider whether to extend a state of emergency in Tokyo, which is experiencing its worst-ever wave of virus cases. The emergency is currently set to be lifted at the end of August.
The imposition of successive states of emergency has become less effective over time, with many bars and restaurants ignoring instructions to close early and stop serving alcohol.
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Koike called for measures that would reduce the frequency of people’s outings by 50 per cent, compared with the period immediately before the current emergency, echoing the advice of a government panel reported by public broadcaster NHK earlier in the day.
Japan has fully vaccinated about 36 per cent of its population, compared with 60 per cent in the UK and 51 per cent in the US, according to Bloomberg’s Vaccine Tracker.
Tokyo found 4,989 new cases of Covid-19 on Thursday after hitting a record 5,042 last week, with the pace of infections appearing to level off. However, the number of patients in hospitals and those in serious condition is continuing to hit records, putting the capital’s health care system under strain.
Japan’s central government is considering extending the state of emergency into September, and expanding it to more regions, the Sankei newspaper reported earlier Thursday.
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It also reported 147 new deaths, taking total fatalities to 6,942.
Infections in Malaysia jump
The country has recorded more than 1.34 million cases overall.
Vietnamese volunteers come to the rescue as lockdown hits needy
Vietnamese man arrested for selling fake test certificates
A new wave of infections since late April has forced Vietnam to impose movement restrictions in a third of its cities and provinces, many of which require people to have negative certificates to move around.
Tran Tuan Duong, who runs a printing business in Bac Ninh province, was arrested on Wednesday while selling six certificates to a client for 1 million dong (US$43.86), the provincial police department said.
Duong, 34, confessed to police that he had sold around 150 such documents, including ones for swab-based polymerase chain reaction (PCR) tests, according to a police statement on Thursday, which said further investigation was under way.
Vietnam has recorded more than 241,000 coronavirus infections and at least 4,487 deaths overall, with the vast majority of those in recent months, which followed a year of successful containment.
Reporting by Reuters, Bloomberg, Associated Press