Sydney reported a record-matching number of new local cases of COVID-19, while infections also rose in the state of Queensland, a day after its most-populous region went into lockdown.
There were 239 cases in Sydney in the 24 hours to 8pm on Saturday, equal to the tally set three days earlier and the most since the Delta variant of SARS-CoV-2 began sweeping through the nation’s largest city in June.
New South Wales Premier Gladys Berejiklian said there were some signs that the virus is mostly being contained to parts of Sydney’s southwest, where the strictest curbs are in place.
Photo: Reuters
While most residents have followed lockdown rules, frustrations have boiled over on several occasions.
More than 1,300 police officers were deployed in Sydney on Saturday to deter any anti-lockdown demonstrators after a violent protests a week earlier. There were no significant disturbances this weekend.
Sydney’s lockdown has been extended three times and there is a risk it might not be lifted as scheduled on Aug. 28, given Delta’s continued spread and because Australia’s vaccination program has lagged behind many other major economies.
Police said that unarmed defense forces personnel would be working with them in Sydney to help with food deliveries, welfare home checks and compliance checks for stay-at-home and self-isolation orders.
There were nine new locally acquired cases in Queensland, which on Saturday imposed a snap three-day lockdown in parts of its southeast, Queensland Chief Health Officer Jeannette Young told a briefing.
A new cluster in Queensland’s capital, Brisbane, highlights the country’s vulnerability to fresh outbreaks, with only enough doses administered to cover 23 percent of the population, Bloomberg’s vaccine tracker showed.
Australia’s vaccine program, which has been heavily dependent on doses from AstraZeneca, has suffered from hesitancy among many people concerned about the risk of blood clots. There is now an increasing effort to boost supplies of Pfizer-BioNTech shots.
The federal government is also in talks to secure COVID-19 therapy medicines that can reduce the severity of infections, the Sunday Telegraph reported, without saying where it obtained the information.
Victoria state, the epicenter of previous outbreak in Melbourne, reported four new local cases. In New Zealand, there were no new cases in the community, health authorities said.
WAKE-UP CALL: Firms in the private sector were not taking basic precautions, despite the cyberthreats from China and Russia, a US cybersecurity official said A ninth US telecom firm has been confirmed to have been hacked as part of a sprawling Chinese espionage campaign that gave officials in Beijing access to private texts and telephone conversations of an unknown number of Americans, a top White House official said on Friday. Officials from the administration of US President Joe Biden this month said that at least eight telecommunications companies, as well as dozens of nations, had been affected by the Chinese hacking blitz known as Salt Typhoon. US Deputy National Security Adviser for Cyber and Emerging Technologies Anne Neuberger on Friday told reporters that a ninth victim
Russia and Ukraine have exchanged prisoners of war in the latest such swap that saw the release of hundreds of captives and was brokered with the help of the United Arab Emirates (UAE), officials said on Monday. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said that 189 Ukrainian prisoners, including military personnel, border guards and national guards — along with two civilians — were freed. He thanked the UAE for helping negotiate the exchange. The Russian Ministry of Defense said that 150 Russian troops were freed from captivity as part of the exchange in which each side released 150 people. The reason for the discrepancy in numbers
A shark attack off Egypt’s Red Sea coast killed a tourist and injured another, authorities said on Sunday, with an Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs source identifying both as Italian nationals. “Two foreigners were attacked by a shark in the northern Marsa Alam area, which led to the injury of one and the death of the other,” the Egyptian Ministry of Environment said in a statement. A source at the Italian foreign ministry said that the man killed was a 48-year-old resident of Rome. The injured man was 69 years old. They were both taken to hospital in Port Ghalib, about 50km north
MISSING: Prosecutors urged the company to move workers out of poor living conditions to hotels, but residents said many workers had already left the town Brazil has stopped issuing temporary work visas for BYD, the Brazilian Ministry of Foreign Affairs said on Friday, in the wake of accusations that some workers at a site owned by the Chinese electric vehicle producer had been victims of human trafficking. The announcement came days after labor authorities said they found 163 Chinese workers who had been brought to Brazil irregularly in “slavery-like” conditions at the BYD factory construction site in the northeastern state of Bahia. The workers were employed by contractor Jinjiang Group, which has denied any wrongdoing. Later, the authorities also said the workers were victims of human trafficking,
RSS