Australia Faces COVID-19 Critical Period Due To Delta Variant, Sydney Closes For Two Weeks

Illustration of deserted Eagle Street, Brisbane, Australia due to COVID-19. (Wikimedia Commons/Kgbo)

JAKARTA - The explosion of cases of the Delta variant of COVID-19 prompted Australian authorities to hold an emergency meeting on Monday, June 28 local time. At least 18 million citizens or 70 percent of the Kangaroo Country's population are now under some type of COVID-19 restriction.

"I think we're entering a new phase of this pandemic, with a more contagious Delta type", Finance Minister Josh Frydenberg told the Australian Broadcasting Corp on Monday, adding Australia was facing a critical time in its fight against COVID-19, citing from NDTV.

Frydenberg said the National Security Committee, chaired by Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison, would be briefed by the country's chief medical officer on Monday.

Sydney, Australia's most populous city, was under lockdown for two weeks over the weekend, while the northern city of Darwin entered a two-day lockdown, as officials grappled to contain the outbreak.

The Australia's state of Queensland on Monday reintroduced mandatory masks and restricted home gatherings in several areas, including the state capital Brisbane, following a similar move by Western Australian officials for the state capital Perth. Restrictions remain in place in the state capital Victoria, Melbourne, and the national capital Canberra.

Health alerts were issued over the weekend for hundreds of passengers after a Virgin Australia cabin crew member infected with COVID-19 worked on five different flights covering Brisbane, Melbourne, and the Gold Coast.

In Sydney, the capital of the state of New South Wales (NSW), dozens of places including cafes, shopping malls, and public transport routes scattered across the city have been added as locations exposed to the virus.

Darwin's lockdown was triggered by the detection of the Delta variant virus in a fly-in, fly-out (FIFO) worker at a gold mine after he left the facility.

Meanwhile, cited from Reuters, eighteen new local cases were reported in NSW on Monday, compared with the previous 30 days, bringing the total infections in the latest outbreak to 130 since the first cases were detected nearly two weeks ago.

"We have to be prepared for numbers to soar and we have to be prepared for numbers to rise rapidly. With this strain, we are seeing almost 100 percent of transmission within households", NSW Prime Minister Gladys Berejiklian told reporters in Sydney.

Australia has so far fared far better than many other developed countries in dealing with the spread of the coronavirus, with more than 30.500 cases and 910 deaths.

Lockdowns, strict social distancing rules, and rapid contact tracing have helped contain previous outbreaks, but the fast-moving Delta variant has concerned authorities.