Coronavirus: Australia ‘not likely’ to enter Christmas lockdown, despite surge in cases
- New South Wales reported a record 2,566 cases but Health Minister Greg Hunt said the high vaccination rate means Australia is well prepared
- While officials are reportedly under pressure to reintroduce mask mandates, state premier Dominic Perrottet said the state will not reimpose curbs
Health Minister Greg Hunt said he was confident Australia would not need to follow the Netherlands, which has reimposed a strict lockdown over the Christmas and New Year period to curb the spread of the highly contagious Omicron variant.
“We’re going into summer, we have one of the highest vaccination rates in the world and a very different set of circumstances. So we don’t see that’s a likely situation in Australia,” Hunt told reporters in a televised media conference.
The Netherlands, he said, has suffered vastly higher infections and deaths than Australia over the pandemic and is now in the depths of winter when cases were more likely to climb sharply.
Netherlands to go into Christmas lockdown to tackle Omicron surge
“We’re well prepared and people are overwhelmingly … continuing to do an amazing job,” Hunt said, referring to the more than 90 per cent of Australians over 16 who have been fully vaccinated.
Australia’s most populous state, New South Wales, on Sunday reported a record 2,566 new cases, up from 2,482 on Saturday. Cases in intensive care remained low at 28, which state premier Dominic Perrottet said was “incredibly positive”.
Pressed by reporters on whether the state was being complacent in the face of mounting cases, Perrottet said the key metric was the number of cases in intensive care.
“It’s a time for calm. But it’s also an important time to go out and get your booster shot, because vaccination has been key to New South Wales’ success,” he said.
Testing confirmed that 313 of the cases involved the Omicron strain, though state health officials said most infections there are likely to be of that variant. As the numbers surge, the health department said it will only undertake genomic sequencing for the Omicron variant in circumstances where it will make a clinical difference to the care of a patient.
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Perrottet is under internal government pressure to reintroduce mandatory mask-wearing for indoor settings and QR code check-ins, The Sydney Morning Herald reported, citing ministers in his cabinet. Just days earlier, measures were relaxed across the state of more than 8 million people.
Perrottet told reporters on Sunday that the government strongly encourages mask wearing, but is not reimposing curbs or mandates for the facial covering. He said the state has “always struck the right balance” and is “in a very strong place”.
Australia’s new Covid-19 cases hit record high
Meanwhile, the Omicron strain is likely to become dominant in Queensland state within days, said John Gerrard, the state’s chief health officer, at a press conference on Sunday. The spread of the new variant “is happening very rapidly, again, even more rapidly than we originally predicted”, Gerrard added. The state reported 34 new local Covid-19 cases on Sunday.
In Victoria state, new infections fell to 1,240 on Sunday from 1,504 a day earlier, with 81 cases in intensive care, 392 hospitalised and four deaths.
The island state of Tasmania said it would reintroduce its indoor mask mandate from midnight on Monday, after detecting three new infections.
Federal government health officials urged the community to get booster shots and to wear masks saying the current rate of transmission is concerning.
“If we see high numbers, that sheer number of cases is a cause for concern,” deputy chief medical officer Sonya Bennett said on Sunday. “My plea to the community is we don’t need to wait for mandates to tell us what is sensible to do. That particularly applies to masks.”
Australia has fared much better than other countries in the pandemic after shutting its borders in March 2020, with around 247,000 total cases and 2,142 deaths.
