Coronavirus: Western Australia state border reopens after 2 years; Omicron wave may have peaked in Malaysia, Indonesia

The removal of the hard border comes as a relief for many families who have been separated by strict travel bans

Elsewhere, South Korean PM Kim Boo-kyum tested positive for Covid-19 as the country’s daily infections continue to soar

Reading Time:5 minutes

Passengers arrive at Perth domestic airport in Western Australia on Thursday. Photo: AAP Image via AP

Published: 12:11pm, 3 Mar 2022Updated: 3:40pm, 3 Mar 2022

The shrinking zero-Covid club just lost another member.

Western Australia (WA) finally reopened its borders to vaccinated travellers on Thursday, after almost two years of closures that were intended to stamp out the coronavirus. That means the entire continent is now once again open to tourists and foreign workers.

The removal of the hard border comes as a relief for many families who have been separated by strict travel bans, and for employers in the state’s lucrative mining sector who have struggled to fill vacancies as workers have been prevented travelling from interstate and overseas.

It brings the state, home to more than 2.6 million people, in line with most of the rest of the world, leaving just Hong Kong and mainland China with effectively closed borders and strict quarantine regimes as more transmissible variants like Omicron starkly show the limits of the zero-Covid strategy.

New Zealand, which has also retained a hard border, this week announced it would drop the self-isolation requirement for vaccinated citizens coming from Australia, amid its own wave of Covid-19 cases. The country is due to open to Australians by July and to all other tourists by October.

While most other Australian states’ borders gradually reopened in 2021 as the Delta and Omicron outbreaks took hold and vaccination rates rose, WA stayed closed as its cases remained near zero for most of the pandemic.