Oz deports top UK columnist over plans to defy curbs
SYDNEY/LONDON: Far-right British commentator Katie Hopkins was deported from Australia on Monday after she boasted on social media that she planned to breach the country’s Covid-19 quarantine rules.
Hopkins had flown into Sydney to appear on a reality television show when she posted a video on Instagram talking about answering the door naked and maskless to workers delivering meals to her hotel room.
She left on a commercial flight from Sydney’s airport early Monday afternoon, a government official said on condition of anonymity because the official was not authorised to make the information public. Police also said she had been fined Aus$1,000 (US$737) for not wearing a face covering.
Fuelled by the more infectious Delta variant, cases are spiking across the Asia-Pacific, parts of Africa and Europe, and even the heavily vaccinated US.
Australian authorities said Victoria state would extend a Covid-19 lockdown beyond Tuesday to slow the spread of the highly infectious Delta variant, despite a slight drop in new infections in the state and nationwide. Victoria state Premier Daniel Andrews said lockdown rules would not be lifted as cases were still being detected in the community.
The coronavirus is known to have claimed more than four million lives since it emerged in late 2019 but, for some nations in the Asia-Pacific, the worst is still ahead. Indonesia has in recent days overtaken India and Brazil as the global Covid-19 hotspot, its daily death toll hitting a record 1,338 on Monday. There are fears people travelling for the Eid
al-Adha festivities could spread the virus further, and authorities in the vast Muslim-majority country strengthened roadblocks on Monday for the start of the holidays.
Vietnam’s capital, Hanoi, was placed under partial lockdown, with millions more people in the nation’s south ordered to stay home, a day after the nation recorded its highest daily caseload.
In Myanmar, where hospitals are empty because of a long-running strike against the military junta, volunteers are going house-to-house to collect bodies for burials. “We are running our service without resting,” Than Than Soe told AFP at the bustling office of her volunteer group.
Thailand reported 11,784 new infections on Monday, the highest single-day increase since the pandemic began, taking the nation’s cumulative cases to 415,170, according to the Centre for Covid-19 Situation Administration.
Worries have also grown in the US, where despite a majority of the adult population receiving at least one shot and months of declining spread, Covid-19 cases have soared by 135% over the past two weeks.