Australia faced a new Covid-19 cluster in Sydney on Tuesday just as Melbourne finally seemed out of the woods, illustrating difficulties in managing the pandemic.
Australia faced a new Covid-19 cluster in Sydney on Tuesday just as Melbourne finally seemed out of the woods, illustrating difficulties in managing the pandemic. Ten people tested positive overnight in Sydney, Australia’s main city, bringing the Bondi Beach area cluster to 21 cases. Gladys Berejiklian, Prime Minister of New South Wales, the country’s most populous state, said health officials expected a spike in cases in the days to come after several people were infected without having had physical contact, including one in a cafe and another in a shopping center.
In response, the authorities have made the wearing of masks again mandatory in transport and businesses in much of greater Sydney, without going as far as confinement. The man behind the cluster is said to be a driver working for airline crews who was infected with the highly contagious Delta variant of the virus, first identified in India. “It must be recognized that this Delta variant is an Olympic champion in person-to-person jumping,” Prime Minister Gladys Berejiklian told reporters. The situation is worsening in Sydney just as it is improving in Melbourne, Australia’s second-largest city, where restrictions are lifted as cases drop after two weeks of lockdown.
Australia has so far contained the spread of Covid-19 on its soil rather well, in particular by means of drastic border control and the rapid implementation of restrictive measures as soon as new cases appear. . But only 6.7 million people have been able to get vaccinated at this stage out of a total of 25 million and most have only been able to receive one dose. The country has totaled since the start of the pandemic less than 30,000 cases of Covid-19 – most of them in the state of Victoria – and less than a thousand deaths for 25 million inhabitants. In the past six months, 18 highly localized outbreaks have appeared across the country following breaches in quarantine systems.
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