Australia says rise in cases risks taking weeks to tame
SYDNEY: A surge in Covid-19 cases in Australia’s second-biggest city could take weeks to subside despite a lockdown and orders to wear masks, a senior medical officer said yesterday as the country braced for a second wave of infection.
Authorities in the state of Victoria, whose capital Melbourne is in partial lockdown amid a new outbreak, reported 275 new Covid-19 cases yesterday, down from a daily record of 438 three days ago.
Australia’s Acting Chief Medical Officer, Paul Kelly, said it would take “weeks” to slow the outbreak to levels seen as recently as June, when Victoria and the rest of Australia reported single or double-digit daily infections.
“We have learned that the time between introducing a measure and seeing its effect is at least two weeks and sometimes longer than that,” he said.
Australia has recorded about 11,800 coronavirus cases with a death toll of 123, a fraction of what has been seen in other countries. In most Australian states the disease has been effectively eliminated.
Less than a month ago, Australia was widely heralded as a global leader in combating Covid-19 but quarantine lapses in Victoria triggered a flare-up in infections in June.
Victoria’s government has ordered about five million people into a partial lockdown for six weeks and told residents around Melbourne to cover their faces if they have to leave their homes.
State Premier Daniel Andrews said it was too soon to declare that such measures had flattened the outbreak. “Until we bring some stability to this, we won’t be able to talk about a trend,” he said, referring to the drop in daily new cases.
The Victorian outbreak and rising daily cases in neighbouring New South Wales, the country’s most-populous state, are stoking fears of a national second wave.
NSW reported 20 new infections yesterday, its highest in three months, but authorities have been unable to trace some of the clusters and have urged people to avoid unnecessary travel and public transport.
Premier Gladys Berejiklian said she would consider tightening social-distancing restrictions in cities like NSW capital Sydney if the numbers continued to rise.
The introduction of new restrictions would be a hammer blow to Australia’s hopes for a quick economic recovery. The country is already facing its first recession in nearly three decades.