Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison yesterday batted away COVID-19 worries three days ahead of federal elections, saying that many reported deaths are not caused by the virus alone and promising not to interfere in people’s lives.
Australia reported 66 COVID-19-related deaths and more than 53,000 infections in the previous 24 hours.
“What you see when you have case numbers at that level is that people, when they pass away for many other causes, that they will die with COVID,” Morrison said. “And the deaths are recorded as COVID deaths, but that does not necessarily mean ... that they passed away because of COVID. That’s a very different proposition.”
Photo: AFP
Australia reports a COVID-19 death for anyone who has a confirmed or probable infection with the virus when they die, unless there is a “clear alternative” cause of death.
“We’re living with COVID,” Morrison said. “We’re not going back to those daily press conferences of people talking about COVID every day, and putting the threat of shutdowns and lockdowns and interfering in people’s lives again.”
“That’s not what I am going to do if I am re-elected on Saturday,” Morrison told reporters. “I am not going to drag Australia back into those times again.”
Opposition Labor Party leader Anthony Albanese, whose party is slightly ahead in the opinion polls despite a recent tightening in the race, said that the pandemic remained a risk.
“We need to step up the national strategy. We need look at not just the number of deaths, but also the number of people who are in hospital, and the number of infections,” Albanese said.
More than 95 percent of people over the age of 16 are fully vaccinated in Australia, which the opposition leader said had helped to reduce the impact of the disease.
However, “it’s still a major issue,” Albanese told the National Press Club in Canberra.
Morrison is widely credited with spending huge sums to protect jobs and the economy during the pandemic.
However, the prime minister has been criticized by the opposition for a sluggish rollout of vaccines and self-administered rapid antigen tests.
Seven people sustained mostly minor injuries in an airplane fire in South Korea, authorities said yesterday, with local media suggesting the blaze might have been caused by a portable battery stored in the overhead bin. The Air Busan plane, an Airbus A321, was set to fly to Hong Kong from Gimhae International Airport in southeastern Busan, but caught fire in the rear section on Tuesday night, the South Korean Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport said. A total of 169 passengers and seven flight attendants and staff were evacuated down inflatable slides, it said. Authorities initially reported three injuries, but revised the number
A colossal explosion in the sky, unleashing energy hundreds of times greater than the Hiroshima bomb. A blinding flash nearly as bright as the sun. Shockwaves powerful enough to flatten everything for miles. It might sound apocalyptic, but a newly detected asteroid nearly the size of a football field now has a greater than 1 percent chance of colliding with Earth in about eight years. Such an impact has the potential for city-level devastation, depending on where it strikes. Scientists are not panicking yet, but they are watching closely. “At this point, it’s: ‘Let’s pay a lot of attention, let’s
UNDAUNTED: Panama would not renew an agreement to participate in Beijing’s Belt and Road project, its president said, proposing technical-level talks with the US US Secretary of State Marco Rubio on Sunday threatened action against Panama without immediate changes to reduce Chinese influence on the canal, but the country’s leader insisted he was not afraid of a US invasion and offered talks. On his first trip overseas as the top US diplomat, Rubio took a guided tour of the canal, accompanied by its Panamanian administrator as a South Korean-affiliated oil tanker and Marshall Islands-flagged cargo ship passed through the vital link between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. However, Rubio was said to have had a firmer message in private, telling Panama that US President Donald Trump
CHEER ON: Students were greeted by citizens who honked their car horns or offered them food and drinks, while taxi drivers said they would give marchers a lift home Hundreds of students protesting graft they blame for 15 deaths in a building collapse on Friday marched through Serbia to the northern city of Novi Sad, where they plan to block three Danube River bridges this weekend. They received a hero’s welcome from fellow students and thousands of local residents in Novi Said after arriving on foot in their two-day, 80km journey from Belgrade. A small red carpet was placed on one of the bridges across the Danube that the students crossed as they entered the city. The bridge blockade planned for yesterday is to mark three months since a huge concrete construction
RSS