Australia yesterday imposed an overnight curfew on its second-biggest city and banned people from moving more than 5km from home to control a growing COVID-19 outbreak that is infecting hundreds daily.
Declaring a “state of disaster,” Victoria Premier Daniel Andrews said that Melbourne would move to Stage 4 restrictions until Sept. 13 given “unacceptably high” levels of community transmission.
Under the harshest rules in Australia to date, city residents are to face a curfew from 8 pm to 5 am for the next six weeks. Only those carrying out essential work, or seeking or providing care, are to be allowed out.
Photo: EPA-EFE
“The time for leniency, the time for warnings and cautions is over,” Andrews said. “If you are not at home and you should be, if you have the virus and are just going about your business, you will be dealt with harshly. Lives are at stake.”
Melbourne residents would be limited to an hour of exercise a day, no further than 5km from home, starting last night.
Only one person per household is allowed to shop for essential items each day, also within the same strict radius.
Most school and university students in Melbourne would go back to online learning from midnight on Wednesday, just weeks after returning to their classrooms, while weddings would also be banned.
The sweeping new measures follow a citywide lockdown that began early last month, but has failed to curb the spread of the virus, with Andrews blaming the continuing rise in cases on people flouting stay-at-home orders.
“These are the decisions made because anything short of this will not keep us safe,” Andrews said, adding that anything less “will see it drag on for months and months and months.”
Additional restrictions affecting workplaces would be announced today, Andrews added, suggesting that non-essential businesses would face closures.
Victoria accounts for the vast majority of active coronavirus cases in Australia, recording 671 new cases and seven deaths from the virus yesterday.
Health authorities have linked the resurgence to security bungles at hotels used to quarantine international travelers that allowed the virus to leak back into the community.
Victoria Chief Health Officer Brett Sutton said that an estimated 20,000 cases were averted during Stage 3 restrictions, but flattening the curve to hundreds of new cases a day was “intolerable.”
“We need to see those numbers through the eyes of our healthcare workers and the kind of awful fear that they have about what it means for people presenting to hospital,” he said.
Outside Melbourne, the rest of Victoria would move to a Stage 3 lockdown from midnight on Wednesday, with people allowed to leave home only for essential work, study, care and needed supplies.
ROLLER-COASTER RIDE: More than five earthquakes ranging from magnitude 4.4 to 5.5 on the Richter scale shook eastern Taiwan in rapid succession yesterday afternoon Back-to-back weather fronts are forecast to hit Taiwan this week, resulting in rain across the nation in the coming days, the Central Weather Administration said yesterday, as it also warned residents in mountainous regions to be wary of landslides and rockfalls. As the first front approached, sporadic rainfall began in central and northern parts of Taiwan yesterday, the agency said, adding that rain is forecast to intensify in those regions today, while brief showers would also affect other parts of the nation. A second weather system is forecast to arrive on Thursday, bringing additional rain to the whole nation until Sunday, it
CONDITIONAL: The PRC imposes secret requirements that the funding it provides cannot be spent in states with diplomatic relations with Taiwan, Emma Reilly said China has been bribing UN officials to obtain “special benefits” and to block funding from countries that have diplomatic ties with Taiwan, a former UN employee told the British House of Commons on Tuesday. At a House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee hearing into “international relations within the multilateral system,” former Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) employee Emma Reilly said in a written statement that “Beijing paid bribes to the two successive Presidents of the [UN] General Assembly” during the two-year negotiation of the Sustainable Development Goals. Another way China exercises influence within the UN Secretariat is
LANDSLIDES POSSIBLE: The agency advised the public to avoid visiting mountainous regions due to more expected aftershocks and rainfall from a series of weather fronts A series of earthquakes over the past few days were likely aftershocks of the April 3 earthquake in Hualien County, with further aftershocks to be expected for up to a year, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said yesterday. Based on the nation’s experience after the quake on Sept. 21, 1999, more aftershocks are possible over the next six months to a year, the agency said. A total of 103 earthquakes of magnitude 4 on the local magnitude scale or higher hit Hualien County from 5:08pm on Monday to 10:27am yesterday, with 27 of them exceeding magnitude 5. They included two, of magnitude
Taiwan’s first drag queen to compete on the internationally acclaimed RuPaul’s Drag Race, Nymphia Wind (妮妃雅), was on Friday crowned the “Next Drag Superstar.” Dressed in a sparkling banana dress, Nymphia Wind swept onto the stage for the final, and stole the show. “Taiwan this is for you,” she said right after show host RuPaul announced her as the winner. “To those who feel like they don’t belong, just remember to live fearlessly and to live their truth,” she said on stage. One of the frontrunners for the past 15 episodes, the 28-year-old breezed through to the final after weeks of showcasing her unique