For an extra week at least, its approximately five million inhabitants Melbourne will have to endure the restrictive measures that have been put in place to stop the spread of the pandemic, as announced by the authorities.
Australia’s second largest city entered on August 5th in the sixth of the lockdown, after the outbreak of an outbreak at school, attributed to the much more contagious Delta variant.
As reported by the Athenian-Macedonian News Agency, Victoria Andrews, the state prime minister in Victoria, announced today that the restrictive measures will be extended until at least August 19., as 20 new cases of SARS-CoV-2 were diagnosed.
“We have too many cases whose origin is unknown (…) so we can put an end to the lockdown now,” he explained.
In Sydney, more than five million residents are in the seventh week of restrictive measures, which will remain in force until the end of the month.
Since the outbreak of the new coronavirus pandemic in New South Wales almost two months ago, the state has recorded more than 6,100 cases.
Hundreds of thousands of residents of cities beyond Sydney (Newcastle, Byron Bay, Dubois) have also been placed under restrictive measures following the recent outbreak.
For almost 18 months, the effective strategy in Australia to prevent the spread of the virus, with an intensive test campaign, tracking contacts, restrictive measures and border closure practices, has borne fruit.
Embolism
But the variant Delta strain seems to have changed the data and the Australians do not hide that they are tired of repeated lockdowns.
Authorities now seem to be pinning their hopes on the vaccination campaign, implying that some restrictions may be eased after a sufficient number of citizens have been immunized in the coming weeks.
Only 20% or so of citizens have received both doses of the vaccine.
“If we maintain the current rate of vaccinations, we will reach six million people vaccinated by the end of August, which will allow us to give more freedoms to the population in September and October,” promised Gladys Beretziklian, Prime Minister of the State.
At this stage, Australia, with a population of 25 million, has recorded 940 deaths from COVID-19 out of a total of approximately 37,000 SARS-CoV-2 cases.
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