Anti-lockdown protest in Melbourne turns violent
Pepper spray used at illegal demonstration, scores arrested after clashes break out between policemen and protesters
MELBOURNE: Several police officers were wounded and hundreds of protesters were arrested in Australia’s secondmost populous city on Saturday in violent clashes at an antilockdown march.
Officers used pepper spray and made over 200 arrests in Melbourne as several hundred attendees flouted stay-at-home orders and marched through an inner-city suburb.
The illegal gathering comes as the city goes through its sixth lockdown since the pandemic started, with the wider state of Victoria reporting over 500 cases of Covid-19 on Saturday.
Police said six officers were taken to hospital after they were pelted with projectiles and trampled in clashes with the crowd of around 700 people.
“What we saw today was a group of protesters that came together, not to protest freedoms, but simply to take on and have a fight with the police,” Victoria police commander Mark Galliott told the media.
Police attempted to reduce access to the centre of the city, blocking roads and stopping public transport in a bid to avoid a repeat of violent scenes at a rally that drew thousands last month.
But marchers then relocated, with footage from one incident showing a crowd charging through a police line as scuffles erupted along a tram route.
Huge numbers of police managed to deter a similar gathering in Sydney, with officers swarming a park where the protest had been due to go ahead.
New South Wales Police said they arrested around 20 people in the city, mainly across the public transport network, while several others were arrested in smaller gatherings around the state.
Both cities are enduring lengthy lockdowns as authorities race to vaccinate a way out of restrictions amid growing outbreaks.
Australia successfully pursued “Covid-zero” for most of the pandemic, enabled mainly by closed international borders and restrictions on movements.
But the arrival of the Delta variant of the coronavirus plunged its two largest cities back under stay-at-home orders earlier this year, and authorities are now aiming for a 70% vaccination rate before further easing lockdowns.
Philippine nurses battle Covid-19, resignations Exhausted nurses in the Philippines are struggling to care for patients as colleagues contract Covid-19 or quit a profession that was dangerously understaffed even before the pandemic. The country is enduring a record rise in infections, fuelled by the Delta variant, with the health department reporting a nursing shortfall of more than 100,000 - forcing those left to work long hours for little pay on often precarious short-term contracts.
“They are tired and burned out,” nursing director Lourdes Banaga, at a private hospital south of Manila, told AFP.
“At the start of the pandemic we had almost 200 nurses,” said Banaga, director for nursing services at the Lipa Medix Medical Center in Batangas province. “By September that will reduce to 63.” Figures show 75,000 nurses are working in public and private Philippine hospitals but roughly 109,000 more are needed.
The pandemic has exacerbated a pre-existing lack of nurses, said Maristela Abenojar, president of Filipino Nurses United - a situation she describes as “ironic” in one of the world’s biggest exporters of healthcare workers.
The “chronic understaffing” is down to inadequate salaries, she said. An entry-level nurse in a public hospital can earn 33,575 pesos ($670) per month. But Abenojar said most were on short-term contracts, earning 22,000 pesos with no benefits.