‘Australia not going back to lockdowns’
CANBERRA: Australian Prime Minister Sco Morrison has declared that he will not allow the country to go back into lockdown in response to the Omicron variant of Covid-19, Xinhua reported.
Morrison met with state and territory leaders yesterday a ernoon to discuss the national response to the new variant of concern a er pushing back the planned reopening by two weeks on Monday night.
Prior to the meeting, Morrison said that federal, state and territory governments would be cautious about Omicron but ruled out a return to strict stay-at-home restrictions. He said he would use the national cabinet meeting to ask state and territory leaders to hold their nerve and keep domestic borders open in the leadup to Christmas on Dec 25.
“We’re not going back to lockdowns. None of us want that,” he told reporters in Canberra yesterday.
“What we did last night was protecting against that by having a sensible pause and to keep proceeding with where we are now and to further assess that information so we can move forward with confidence.”
Earlier yesterday, Health Minister Greg Hunt said that the federal government’s ‘overwhelming view’ is that the Omicron variant is ‘manageable’.
As of yesterday, six cases of the new variant have been confirmed in Australia.
Yesterday morning, Australia reported more than 1,100 new
Covid-19 cases and nine deaths as the country continues to ba le the third wave of infections.
The majority of new cases were in Victoria, the country’s second-most populous state with Melbourne as the capital city, where 918 cases and six deaths were reported.
As of Monday, 92.4 per cent of Australians aged 16 and over had received one vaccine dose and 87 per cent had their second dose, according to the Department of Health.